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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27749878">And Neither Do You</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/callsigntango/pseuds/callsigntango'>callsigntango</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>15x20 is trash, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bi Dean, Blood and Violence, Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, Dean Winchester is Loved, DeanCas - Freeform, Destiel - Freeform, Fix-It, M/M, POV Dean, Quote: Family Don't End With Blood (Supernatural), THE RUSTY NAIL DOES NOT EXIST, a lot of this is about coming to terms with self-worth and accepting yourself for who you really are, and gay love to pierce the veil and save the day, andrew dabb can fuck off right into the sun, but with a better monster and higher stakes, i promise this has a happy ending, please you gotta believe me, the sound you hear is me flipping off the cw, this is kindof a finale rewrite</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 20:34:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>45,309</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27749878</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/callsigntango/pseuds/callsigntango</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Come, now,” he heard Cas rasp. It wasn’t coming from the phone anymore, but from right outside the door.</p><p>Dean lowered the phone and took a hesitant step forward, his bare foot sinking into the damp, rotting carpet. “Cas, what’s wrong? I don’t … You’re not making any sense.”</p><p>“I have something for you,” Cas said, and this time it came as a whisper in a language Dean didn’t know, yet somehow understood.</p><p>Dean froze in his tracks, his hand hovering just over the doorknob. He wanted so desperately for it to be Cas on the other side of this door, but he knew deep down that something was horribly, horrifically wrong.</p><p>The rise of a new, hands-off God has unintended consequences, and the promise of free will reaches further than anyone intended. In the absence of the one who'd locked them away, and beneath the cracked and abused surface of the Midwest, an Old God stirs. Here, death is not the peace you're looking for, and there's one person left to save.</p><p>Or: family don't end in blood, and neither does Dean Winchester.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Castiel &amp; Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>81</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>247</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Supernatural, Supernatural Finale Fix Its, Supernatural Finale Fix-Its, supernatural fics i think about six times a week</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><span class="u"> <strong>Part</strong> </span> <strong><span class="u"> One</span>: What's Left Behind</strong></p><p>There’s a single moment every day where grief simply does not exist. A moment that somehow hangs in the air despite its brevity; a moment incomprehensibly trapped between states of being.</p><p>For Dean, it was the moment his alarm clock went off.</p><p>He slung a heavy arm out from under his pillow with a groan, pawing at the damn thing to shut it up. After a few unsuccessful smacks, and almost knocking the clock off the nightstand in the process, Dean reluctantly sat up.</p><p>“Alright, alright,” he growled, finally finding the snooze button. “Enough already.” He took a breath in the sudden still air as quietness resettled into the room.</p><p>And then it hit him like a ton of bricks. Reality came rushing back, like it always did – and this time, it carried the weight of immeasurable loss. A grief that damn near pinned him to the mattress. Dean’s shoulders suddenly felt far too heavy to be in any position but lying down, and he sank back down and squeezed his eyes shut.</p><p><em>You changed me</em>. Dean pressed his palms into his face as though he were trying to shove the memory of Cas’s confession back into his subconscious.</p><p><em>I cared about the whole world, because of you.</em> Dean scrubbed his face and dug his fingernails into his scalp, silently begging his world-class ability of repression to kick in and lock this away for good.</p><p><em>I love you.</em> Dean yelled and sprang out of his bed, chucking the blankets as though they’d burned him. He instinctively clutched his chest, breathing hard and fixing a vacant stare at the handgun he’d left half-disassembled on his desk.</p><p><em>Fuck</em>.</p><p>He didn’t know how long he stood there, teetering on the edge of panic. He was half-expecting Sam to knock on his door, or for Jack to poke in and ask some inane question, or for a certain angel to make a poorly timed entrance and utter a gruff hello.</p><p>But none of those things happened. No one checked in. Dean was alone.</p><p>Typical.</p><p>He shook his head to dislodge the thought. He did his best to swallow his grief, spinning the game show wheel of shitty emotions in his head. The needle landed halfway between sarcastic nihilism and self-loathing. Ah, yeah. That’s the stuff.</p><p>Dean shrugged on a flannel he’d pulled out of what he thought was probably the “kinda clean” pile (but it passed the sniff test so it didn’t really matter where it came from) and a pair of jeans he’d half-kicked under the bed.</p><p>He swung open the door and almost tripped over a scruffy yellow dog that’d been curled up right outside.</p><p>“Hey, boy,” he said as he leaned down to ruffle the fur behind the dog’s ears. “Were you checkin’ up on me?” At least <em>someone</em> cared.</p><p>The dog leaned into Dean’s hand, and he swore the dog was grinning. For a brief moment, Dean felt a little lighter. He straightened back up and followed the dog into the kitchen, both drawn forward by the smell of something freakin’ <em>awesome</em>.</p><p>“Morning, sunshine,” Sam smirked, nodding over his shoulder in greeting. He’d probably been up for hours already. The kid was always raring to go at the crack of dawn. A trait Dean neither understood nor envied.</p><p>Dean grumbled an acknowledgement before trying to sneak a piece of bacon fresh out of the skillet, but Sam smacked his hand with the spatula. “<em>Hey</em>!” Dean shot him a betrayed look, but Sam only clenched his jaw and sternly side-eyed him in return.</p><p>“Just wait a minute.”</p><p>“Fine,” Dean backed off, mouthing “<em>just wait a minute</em>” in mockery at the dog as he headed over to the table.</p><p>“I heard that.”</p><p>Dean ignored him. “Sorry, I tried to get you some bacon, bud,” he said, shrugging at the dog. “Take it up with Julia Child in the kitchen there.”</p><p>The dog just tilted his head at Dean in confusion, in an oddly familiar way that sent a pang of grief right through his chest.</p><p>“He needs a better name than that.”</p><p>“Than what?”</p><p>“Bud.”</p><p>Dean hadn’t really considered that to be the dog’s name, it was just a term of endearment he’d thrown around until it stuck. But he had a history of doing that – the same thing happened with Baby.</p><p>Dean looked down at the dog and – mostly to annoy Sam, asked, “What do you think, bud?”</p><p>Bud barked. Case closed. Dean threw up his hands in a shrug at Sam, who rolled his eyes and turned backed to the stove.</p><p>“Weren’t you calling him Miracle before?” Sam asked, scraping scrambled eggs onto the plates.</p><p>Dean grimaced. “Yeah, don’t you think that’s giving Chuck a little too much credit?” It was more of a statement than a question. Chuck’s name still left a bad taste in his mouth. Sure, they were free now – free to die boring, slow deaths of high cholesterol or, in Sam’s case, some kind of other boring way normal people died. They were free to stumble through the rest of their existences with no real cosmic purpose. Just saving people, hunting things, the good ol’ simple family business.</p><p><em>Family</em>. Sam had Eileen, after all, and Dean had… Well, Dean had—</p><p><em>Son of a bitch.</em> He couldn’t do this. Suddenly his appetite had tilted sideways and his palms itched to feel the familiar curve of a beer bottle. He hadn’t even realized he’d stood up, the sound of his chair clattering to the ground barely registered in his ears.</p><p>“Dean.” It sounded muffled, far away.</p><p>The kitchen fuzzed at the edges, the smell of grease making the air feel thick, too thick to breathe. He gasped and gripped the edge of the table until his knuckles turned white.</p><p>“Dean!”</p><p> A hand suddenly gripped his shoulder, shocking him out of whatever <em>that</em> was. He blinked up at Sam in confusion. <em>When had he walked over here?</em></p><p>“I’m fine,” Dean said, shrugging Sam’s hand away. “I just—I’m gonna go eat in my room. I gotta finish putting the Ruger back together.” Dean scooped up a plate and nearly bolted out of the room before Sam could argue, Bud hot on his heels.</p><p>“At least change your shirt!” Sam yelled after him. “You smell like ass.”</p><p>Dean flipped him off over his shoulder and kept moving.</p><p> </p><p>////</p><p> </p><p>The next few days (weeks?) slipped by much the same way. He didn’t have any idea how much time had passed – every day felt the same: empty, lonely, devoid of meaning or memory. He finally had the freedom to do whatever he wanted, to be whatever he wanted, but he was trapped. Trapped in this hell loop deep underground, his mind going over all the ways he’d fucked up.</p><p>All the ways he wasn’t worthy.</p><p>How Cas should’ve just let Billie take him right there and then. Going out in a blaze of glory after mortally wounding Death herself. Fitting, right? That’s how Dean was always supposed to go out: locked in battle, still swinging, throwing his broken body on the sword just to save a world that wouldn’t do the same for him in return.</p><p>But no. Cas had stubbornly refused to follow the Way Things Were Meant To Be, something Dean had seen him do time and time again. He should’ve seen this coming, too. But he never expected it to be like <em>this</em>.</p><p>That … confession. Cas’s final words had torn through Dean’s very soul as though they were Death’s scythe itself.</p><p>Dean had sat on the cold floor of the bunker’s interrogation room for hours after the Empty dragged Cas away to an unreachable plane, just trying to process it. The only angel to ever truly love, so full of life and feeling, now locked away in an eternal expanse devoid of any of that.</p><p><em>I love you,</em> he’d said. Words Cas clearly had never planned to say, and ones Dean had never expected to hear. Just admitting it was – what had Cas called it? A moment of true happiness for him?</p><p>Because it was something he thought he could never have: Dean. Requited love.</p><p>Hell, didn’t they make quite the pair. The angel who had learned to love, and the man who would never deserve it.</p><p>Dean sat on the edge of his bed, holding out his plate for Bud to eat what was left. He watched the dog blankly as it happily scarfed down the scraps, in what had become a daily ritual. Dean would wordlessly take a plate from the kitchen from Sam, eat a few bites, toss the rest to the dog, and then go for a drive.</p><p>It was an exhausting routine.</p><p>But when Sam finally offered to interrupt it, every fiber in Dean’s body fought back.</p><p>“I think I’ve got something,” Sam said as Dean stepped into the library. He’d been squinting at his laptop for a few days now, desperately searching the feeds to find something to get Dean out of the bunker.</p><p>“Hm,” Dean grunted, taking a swig of his second (third?) beer of the afternoon. It was crap beer – really tasted like stagnant water out of a rusty gas station sink – but it kept him firmly grounded in this plane of existence, and out of his head.</p><p>“A body dropped a few days ago up in Canton,” Sam said, leaning forward and narrowing his eyes to read the text on his screen. The thought of teasing Sam about needing reading glasses in his old age passed through Dean’s mind, but he didn’t have the energy to say it out loud. “A dad, body totally drained of blood. The two kids are missing. But get this – whatever it was let the mom live, but cut out her tongue.”</p><p>Dean slumped into the chair across from Sam and plunked his beer down on the table. Sam glanced at the bottle, and Dean could tell he was weighing the pros and cons of nagging him about using a coaster. Luckily, Sam just pressed on.</p><p>“It really sounds like our kind of thing.”</p><p>Dean chewed his lip and stared past Sam at the shelves behind him. “No.”</p><p>“But—“</p><p>“That wood nymph fixed up the other cars in the garage. You can go yourself.”</p><p>“You didn’t even let me—“</p><p>“I said <em>no,</em> Sam,” Dean huffed, grabbing his beer and shoving his chair back to stand. He had to leave, had to get out of here before the room started fuzzing again. Every inch of him was screaming to get back to the prison cell that was his bedroom. Locked up, alone, where he deserved to be. “Nothing good happens in Ohio.”</p><p>“A pie festival does,” Sam blurted out before Dean could stop him again.</p><p>Dean paused, turning his head to not quite look at Sam over his shoulder, but enough for Sam to take it as an invitation to continue.</p><p>“Yeah they have dozens of pie shops from all over the state, there’s even a ticket for all-you-can-eat, and—“</p><p>Dean cut him off. He fished the Impala’s keys out of his pocket and dangled them in the air. “Let’s go.”</p><p>Sam looked relieved. And then immediately concerned.</p><p>“I’m driving, though,” he said. “You’ve been drinking.”</p><p>“What?” Dean gestured wildly at the bottle in his hand. “I’ve barely drank half.”</p><p>“Half a six-pack,” Sam countered.</p><p>“Oh, so you’re counting now?”</p><p>“Someone has to.”</p><p>Dean glowered at Sam, but tossed him the keys anyway. “I still get to pick the music.”</p><p> </p><p>////</p><p> </p><p>The next thing Dean knew, they had made it to a sketchy motel just outside of Canton. <em>Fuck</em>, he thought, laying back on the bed and gripping the sides of his head. He must’ve had a lot more beers than he’d thought.</p><p>His head ached. His whole body ached. He couldn’t get comfortable – a spring from the mattress dug painfully into his hip no matter how he laid.</p><p>The room was pitch dark, and the only noise he could hear was Sam’s soft breathing and the rumble of the occasional car outside. Had he really blacked out for an entire 12-hour car ride? <em>Probably more like 16, with Sam’s driving</em>, he mused bitterly.</p><p>He shifted around some more before giving up on sleep altogether – he didn’t feel tired anyway. He didn’t feel much of anything, really, except his joints screamed every time he moved.</p><p>Dean sat up and reached for his phone, squinting as the sudden brightness of his screen stung the back of his eyes. <em>Twelve missed calls</em>.</p><p>Wait, what?</p><p>He swiped to unlock his phone and scrolled through the list of missed calls, all coming just a few minutes apart.</p><p>As though someone were panicking.</p><p>His heart clenched with a mixture of relief and fear when he saw the name of the first missed call.</p><p>
  <em>Cas.</em>
</p><p>He gripped his phone so tight he thought he heard the case start to crunch beneath his fingers.</p><p>The second call was from Cas. And the third. And the fourth.</p><p>He scrolled faster, desperately thumbing down his screen, every muscle in his body clenching, telling him both to run and that he fucked up again, that he wasn’t here when Cas needed him, that—</p><p>His phone buzzed with an incoming call.</p><p>
  <em>Cas.</em>
</p><p>He almost dropped his phone trying to answer.</p><p>“Cas?!” He shouted, not caring that Sam was asleep a few feet away. His voice came out ragged, and his throat felt raw. “Cas is that you?”</p><p>There was static on the other end.</p><p>“Cas, I’m so sorry, I—“</p><p>The static dropped away.</p><p>“Dean,” Cas’s voice was rougher than he remembered. Empty, even. Like the first time they’d met, when Cas was still a soldier with the personality of a heart monitor that had flatlined. “Help.”</p><p>“Where are you?” Dean’s voice was strained. His heart was beating so fast he struggled to breathe.</p><p>“I’m where I’ve always been.”</p><p>Dean sprang up and turned to the door of the motel room, which was stained black with mold. It was only then he realized the whole room reeked of decay. The picture frames hung slack and crooked on the walls, the glass spider-webbed with cracks, and there were entire clusters of mushrooms growing out of puddles in the sunken carpet. Dark, black tendrils of fungus crawled up the wallpaper, burying themselves deep into the very bones of the building. Mold had claimed every bit of this room as its own.</p><p>Dean suddenly felt like he was trespassing somewhere he really ought not to be.</p><p>“Come now,” he heard Cas rasp. It wasn’t coming from the phone anymore, but from right outside the door.</p><p>Dean lowered the phone and took a hesitant step forward, his bare foot sinking into the damp, rotting carpet. “Cas, what’s wrong? I don’t … You’re not making any sense.”</p><p>“I have something for you,” Cas said, and this time it came as a whisper in a language Dean didn’t know, yet somehow understood.</p><p>Dean froze in his tracks, his hand hovering just over the doorknob. He wanted so desperately for it to be Cas on the other side of this door, but he knew deep down that something was horribly, horrifically wrong.</p><p>“Don’t be shy.” Something akin to a laugh gurgled in the back of the throat of the Thing That Wasn’t Cas.</p><p>Dean took a deep, grounding breath, and the air was thick with death and decay. His chest heaved with the effort of it, and he clawed at the neck of his shirt in a desperate attempt for air. It felt like trying to breathe underwater.</p><p>He knew this wasn’t Cas. But if something was possessing him, or if it really was Cas calling out to him, he’d never forgive himself for standing by once again and letting the angel die. With a surge of resolve, Dean gripped the doorknob, which was fuzzed with moss and mold.</p><p>He tore the door open, to nothing.</p><p>Dean looked out into the empty parking lot. The only thing on the other side of this door was the sound of crickets chirping in the bushes outside, and the hum of the ice machine a few doors down. Behind him, he heard the sound of Sam breathing, still asleep.</p><p>He stood in the doorway, relishing in the gust of fresh air that wasn’t heavy with whatever the fuck was going on in the motel room. He’d been through this before, he thought. After he’d made it out of Purgatory without Cas. He’d started seeing things, hearing things, things that weren’t there. He’d chalked it up to guilt and loss – and this time seemed no different.</p><p>Until it was.</p><p>A heavy hand fell on Dean’s shoulder, and he whipped around with a start.</p><p>“Hello, Dean.”</p><p>Dean bit back a shout. The greeting poured out of Cas’s mouth thick and heavy, like he’d spoken it through a mouthful of oil.</p><p>No, not Cas. Something <em>wearing </em>Cas.</p><p>Cas’s skin hung loose on whatever this thing was, like a suit three sizes too large. The hand on Dean’s shoulder was speckled with gaping sores that oozed a viscous black liquid, and smeared a dark, damp handprint into Dean’s shirt.</p><p>Dean just looked at its face in horror. <em>Cas’s</em> face, which sagged and slid around on the skull beneath it as the Thing That Wasn’t Cas tilted its head in a hauntingly familiar way. Its eyes were closed, but Dean could feel its stare burrowing into his brain nonetheless, like the tendrils of fungus burrowing into the walls around him. The same dank-smelling thick liquid bubbled out of Not-Cas’s mouth and nose and dripped from beneath his eyelids.</p><p>The thing seemed to delight in Dean’s fear. It tried to smile, pulling Cas’s lips back into an inhuman sneer stretched far too wide to be remotely human. Its teeth were yellowed and fuzzed with lichen. It leaned forward and whispered in a voice it had stolen from Cas. “I know … your … secret,” the words seemed to drip from every open sore, every leaking orifice in its skin.</p><p>“<em>Cas,</em>” Dean barely recognized his own voice, as the name ripped from his chest with a sob sown with desperation. “Cas, are you in there?”</p><p>Dean reached forward with a shaky hand, resting it on the side of Not-Cas’s sagging face. The second his hand made contact, a blinding pain seared through his palm. He gritted his teeth and kept it pressed to the thing’s cheek, his hand burning and blistering.</p><p>“Cas, answer me,” Dean choked out through clenched teeth. The blisters had started to creep along the back of his hand and up his arm, weeping a thick, black liquid of their own. But he refused to pull away. “I’m not leaving you like this.” Tears stung the edges of Dean’s eyes. “I won’t.”</p><p>The impossibly wide grin fell from the thing’s face, its jaw falling slack, and its eyes snapped open.</p><p>Dean was met by deep, cerulean eyes full of pain. Full of <em>feeling</em>. This wasn’t the monster looking at him.</p><p>“Cas,” Dean’s chest heaved with a sob, relief rushing through every vein in his body. He brought another hand up to cradle Cas’s face – a hand that instantly blistered. Dean barely felt it.</p><p>Cas fixed his gaze on Dean, though he looked like he was struggling to focus.</p><p>“D-Dean,” Cas stammered, sputtering and coughing through a mouthful of oil. The hand on his shoulder gripped him tighter, and Cas’s pupils blew wide with fear. “<em>Run.</em>”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><span class="u"><strong>Part</strong><strong> Two:</strong></span> <strong>What Lies Ahead</strong></p><p>
  <em>And that night, I dreamt of the Moss Man, who only speaks in stolen whispers and borrowed tongues, who has no eyes, only wounds to weep from.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Dean jolted up with a start. He scrambled to get his bearings, and it took a minute for him to realize he was folded into the passenger seat of the Impala. He glanced frantically at his hands. No blisters. Just a nightmare.</p><p>He took a moment to gather himself, trying to play it off as a good ol’ sobriety wakeup so Sam didn’t pry. The last thing he needed was to talk about a bad dream. They both had their fair share of those.</p><p>Every joint ached and creaked in protest as he awkwardly tried to stretch within the confines of the Impala’s passenger seat. He didn’t even realize he’d zonked out like that – he’d only been faking sleep to prevent Sam from trying to make “meaningful brother bonding” conversation.</p><p>But now that he’d obviously, stupidly returned to the reality of being awake inside a confined space with his overly concerned little brother, all bets were off.</p><p>“How far out?” Dean asked, massaging the spot on his hip that had been pressed uncomfortably into the handle to roll down the window. <em>That explained the mattress spring</em>, he thought bitterly, trying to convince himself his nightmare meant nothing. <em>Was </em>nothing. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved by that or not.</p><p>“We just passed the exits for Dayton, so…” Sam bobbed his head as he worked out the math. “About three hours.”</p><p>Dean dropped his head to the headrest with a thunk. “With the pace you drive, probably more like four.”</p><p>Sam laughed a little. It was hesitant, but genuine. Dean reveled in the hint of normalcy the moment brought, but it didn’t last long. As quickly as it began, the moment dropped into silence.</p><p>Sam shifted in his seat, struggling to think of something to say. Dean felt too listless and distracted to fight it. He was still reeling from the emotional whiplash of that hellish dreamscape. So, he waited.</p><p>A few painful minutes passed before Sam finally cleared his throat.</p><p>“So, uh. You doing okay?”</p><p>“What kind of dumbass question is that?” The buildup had immediately put Dean on the offensive. He had planned to just mutter a half-hearted “I’m fine” like he had been for the last few weeks in the bunker. But his nightmare had put him on edge, and this response tore out of his mouth faster than he could think to stop it.</p><p>Sam flinched. “Look, man. You’re clearly not fine. I tried giving you space but…” He trailed off.</p><p>Dean turned to stare out the window, but it was well after sunset and too dark to see anything but his own reflection. <em>Fuck. I look like Hell.</em></p><p>“You still never told me what happened back there. What happened with Cas.”</p><p>Hearing the name spoken aloud turned Dean’s grief and fear into a defensive ferocity he didn’t realize was simmering just below the surface. He whipped around with something akin to a snarl.</p><p>“I <em>told</em> you. Cas is dead. Gone. Never coming back.”</p><p>Sam steeled himself and gripped the steering wheel tighter. “How do you know that?”</p><p>“He just <em>is</em>. He summoned the Empty, Sam. It took him.” He slumped back in his seat to stare out the Impala’s windshield. “You don’t come back from that.”</p><p>“How?”</p><p>Dean glanced at Sam, confused.</p><p>Sam backtracked. “I mean, how did he summon the Empty? I must’ve read Rowena’s grimoire and the Angel Tablet a thousand times and I’ve never seen any spell that would do that.”</p><p>Dean took a breath to steady himself. <em>Stay vague</em>. “Apparently he struck a deal with that thing to save Jack.”</p><p>“Cas struck a <em>deal</em>?” Sam’s voice rose with alarm. “And you’re just telling me this <em>now</em>?”</p><p>“I didn’t know either!” Dean snapped. “But he’s gone. It’s done.”</p><p>“So that’s it, you’re just giving up.”</p><p>“It’s <em>over</em>, Sam!”</p><p>“Cas is family, Dean. We don’t just give up on family,” his voice wavered. “You’re not the only one who’s hurting.”</p><p>“You think I don’t know that? <em>Fuck</em> you.” Dean dug his nails into his palm, resisting the urge to punch the dash until either it broke, or his hand did. He wanted to feel pain, to bleed. It’s what he fucking deserved.</p><p>Dean desperately wished he hadn’t woken up while still in the car. Deep down, maybe he wished he hadn’t woken up at all.</p><p>“I just thought you might be ready to talk about it, is all. It’s been weeks, and…”</p><p>“And?”</p><p>“Dean, you practically shouted his name in your sleep.”</p><p>Silence fell over the Impala. Sam had long since turned off the stereo, and the only sound around them was the engine’s ever-familiar rumble as they sped down the darkened highway. It was a long moment before either of them spoke again.</p><p>“Pull over,” Dean said.</p><p>Sam opened his mouth to object, but thought better of it. He eased the Impala onto the shoulder and shifted into park.</p><p>Dean flung open the door with a growl and stepped out into the night.</p><p>“It’s my turn to drive.”</p><p> </p><p>////</p><p> </p><p>The next few hours were painfully, thankfully, uneventful. Dean had punched the stereo back on, and Sam had started sifting through Dad’s journal and some other texts he’d brought along to get a head start on the case.</p><p>They pulled into a dingy motel just outside of Canton’s city limits, and aside from exchanging only a few necessary words, settled in for the night in silence.</p><p>Dean tried desperately not to notice that it was the same room from his dream. He said nothing to Sam, who seemed to be back to giving Dean the same wide berth he’d been giving him in the bunker.</p><p>It put him a little at ease to see the room only had a normal amount of mold for a motel, and the pictures hung neatly on the walls. There were no mushrooms, no blackened stains, no sinking, wet carpet. Dean still made sure the door was locked and dead-bolted, and he slipped a blade beneath his pillow just in case.</p><p>Dean managed to catch a few minutes of sleep here and there, but mostly he just laid there in the dark with his eyes shut. It felt quiet, and empty, and so very dark. <em>Was this what it’s like for Cas right now?</em></p><p>The thought crept up on him with no warning.</p><p>He curled in on himself and took a shaky breath. <em>God damnit, Cas. What the fuck were you thinking?</em> He directed the question out into the nothing. Cas was gone. Jack was off-world doing whatever it was that God did.</p><p>There was no one to hear his prayer, if anyone could even call it that.</p><p>
  <em>It should have been me, Cas. You should have let me die. You didn’t deserve this. There’s nothing for me here. Not without—</em>
</p><p>He didn’t let himself finish the thought. His eyes stung with exhaustion and grief, and he blinked back the sensation of tears. He wasn’t going to lay here and cry – he’s Dean Freakin’ Winchester.</p><p>Except he didn’t fully believe the whole strong bravado façade anymore. His false confidence had been shattered. He didn’t feel whole. It felt like a piece of himself had been permanently damaged the second the Empty came through that wall. All because Castiel had confessed to Dean that he loved him.</p><p>No, that he was <em>in</em> love with him.</p><p>Dean still didn’t quite know how to process that. No one had really ever said that to him before, and he’d long ago resigned himself to a life devoid of that kind of love. He didn’t deserve it, and the last time he’d selfishly tried, he almost got Lisa and Ben killed.</p><p>That was the last time Dean had let himself even entertain the idea of a relationship. Dean knew he’d loved Lisa, but she was his only baseline. And this thing with Cas – whatever it was – felt so incredibly different. So much more intense.</p><p>When he’d lost Lisa, it was though he’d been punched in the heart. When he’d lost Cas, it was though his heart had crumpled and turned to dust, with particles so fine it could never be pieced back together.</p><p>This felt nothing like Lisa.</p><p>There was no way he was in love with Cas, was there?</p><p>The mere thought of it burned so bright, it felt like looking directly into the sun, and Dean had no choice but to look away.</p><p>The morning couldn’t come soon enough. For once, Dean had gotten up before Sam, and was ready to walk out the door before Sam had even finished waking up. He wanted this case to be over quickly so he could grab some pie, and then go back to wasting away in the bunker in peace.</p><p>And really, despite the uneventful night proving his nightmare was nothing more than a harmless dream, this motel room made every hair on the back of his neck stand on end.</p><p> </p><p>////</p><p> </p><p>It seemed like a pretty typical hunt.</p><p>They posed as a couple of Suits, flashed a badge, got the cops to tell them everything they needed to know about the investigation without question. This was one of the few parts of the job that got easier with age – they were questioned a lot more a decade ago, with Sam’s baby-face and Dean’s voice hitting at a few octaves higher.</p><p>They had a game plan. Find the two missing kids, and kill the sons of bitches who’d snatched them.</p><p>Once they got the information they needed, they drove out to a secluded field to regroup, since Dean had insisted they check out of the motel and never go back. Sam had just given Dean a puzzled look, but didn’t push him any further. He’d already cornered Dean once in the past 24 hours and been bitten. He wasn’t about to do it again.</p><p>Sam spread a map out on the hood of the Impala while Dean dug through Dad’s journal.</p><p>“I know I’ve seen that face before,” Dean muttered, skimming the pages of the weathered journal. They hadn’t cracked open the book in years, but the surviving vic – the mom whose tongue was cut out – had given the cops a drawing of the masks the monsters were wearing.</p><p>And it was something that instantly struck a chord with Dean.</p><p>“Ah, here it is. Sam, look at this.” Dean pressed his palm against the page a few times to smooth it down. The pages were crinkled from some sort of water-damage – or, more likely, beer-damage. He held it out for Sam to see. “1986. There was a string of kidnappings up and down 77.”</p><p>“All kids between the ages of five and ten,” Sam squinted. “Demon?”</p><p>Dean shook his head. “Rowena’s got that shit locked down, remember? No deals.”</p><p>“Huh,” Sam looked back down at the map. “Where and when were the other kidnappings?”</p><p>“The ’86 one was in Dover,” Dean tilted the journal to make out his dad’s messy handwriting. “There was an earlier one in ’82 up in Akron, and it looks like,” he flipped the page. “There was a later one in 1990 as far down as Cambridge that Dad wrote down but never checked out.”</p><p>“That seems pretty regular. Like something’s feeding.” Sam was circling cities and scrawling out the dates on the map in sharpie.</p><p>“Dad seemed to think it was a nest of vamps.”</p><p>“But why cut the tongues out?” Sam pressed his palms into the hood and leaned into it, staring at the map like it somehow knew the answer.</p><p>Dean gasped. “I know <em>exactly</em> what this is.”</p><p>Sam jolted up. “What?”</p><p>“Mimes,” Dean’s face lit up and he spread out his hands. “<em>Vampire</em> mimes.”</p><p>“Vampire. Mimes.” Sam spoke slowly, like he was clearly struggling to wrap his head around the idea.</p><p>“You know,” Dean held up his palms and walked his hands around an invisible wall. “The weird clowns who don’t talk?”</p><p>Sam stiffened and clenched his jaw. “I <em>know</em> what mimes are, Dean.”</p><p>“I’m tellin’ ya, that’s what this is.”</p><p>Sam closed his eyes and took a deep breath to compose himself. “Alright,” he said, reaching up to push his hair out of his face. “Whatever it is only seems to hunt every few years, so they probably won’t be hitting another family anytime soon. So we’ve got to find their nest.”</p><p>Sam tapped the pen against the Impala, and it took every ounce of Dean’s self-control to not snatch it out of his hand.</p><p>“Wait a second,” Dean said, opening up the file they’d gotten from the scene. “How many kids were snatched in the other three cases we know about?”</p><p>Sam reached across the hood and slid the journal over to where he could see it. He paused for a minute, skimming the page. “One.”</p><p>“Yeah, and this time,” Dean smacked the folder for emphasis, “they nabbed two.”</p><p>Realization dawned on Sam’s face. “So they can’t have gotten very far.”</p><p>“Bingo.”</p><p>They spent the next couple of hours pouring over the maps and googling sites that looked as though they could be conveniently abandoned. And considering Canton has a history of being a railroad town, there were a <em>lot</em> of old factories and defunct manufacturing sites.</p><p>But lucky for them, the city had started to convert a lot of them into usable things again, from art galleries to eclectic apartments. That left them with just a few places that were truly abandoned. There were a handful of old factories, but those were all surrounded by urban sprawl. Not secluded enough. A little further out was an abandoned auto plant, but Sam pointed out it seemed too big and open on the inside for a nest of monsters to feel hidden enough.</p><p>That left them with two real options: a steel plant southwest of the city, or a long-abandoned farm to the east.</p><p>They flipped a coin and, since they didn’t have God writing luck into their cards anymore, did exactly the opposite of what the coin toss decided.</p><p>And that meant going to the farm.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>hint: it's not mimes</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nightfall was still several hours away, so they killed time preparing for the hunt. Dean had nudged Sam about going to the pie festival in the meantime, but Sam just rolled his eyes and said, “After.”</p><p>Dean didn’t fight him on that. It didn’t feel right to reward himself while two kids were still missing. And honestly, Dean hadn’t wanted to break away from the case. He’d been burying himself in it, focusing only on the task at hand, and it was a welcome reprieve from all the intrusive thoughts that flooded in during downtime.</p><p>They soaked some bullets in dead man’s blood, since there was a good amount of evidence in Dad’s journal to suggest this really was a bunch of vamps who were just inexplicably extra freaky on the side. Dad had hunted down a few of the fuckers from this nest before, and decapitation worked just fine – so Dean didn’t think they needed to prepare much else. But they doused their machetes in holy water, just in case.</p><p>The drive out to the potential nest was quiet, save for Deep Purple drifting out through the speakers and Sam telling Dean where to turn. Dean gripped the wheel and hummed along to “Smoke on the Water” to both calm his nerves and get his head in the game for the hunt.</p><p>He didn’t quite know why there was a twinge of nervousness coiled just beneath his ribs. They’d fought <em>God</em> and won for fuck’s sake. This was just a bunch of lowly monsters, something he’d taken out time and time again for decades.</p><p>Maybe it was the fact he hadn’t gone on a hunt like this for a while. Maybe it was the way the briars and underbrush reached thick, dark vines like fingers of an outstretched hand toward the road, toward their tires. Maybe it was the quiet, lingering voice in the back of his head mocking him for not being as good as he thought he was now that God’s storyline wasn’t on his side.</p><p>He shoved that thought down – if that was the case, the world would’ve ended weeks ago. <em>That’s bullshit</em>, he told himself. But the muted fear of inadequacy stained his thoughts.</p><p>Regardless of what it was, something felt off.</p><p>“Turn here,” Sam said, pointing out his window to a gap in the trees. There wasn’t so much a road off to the right than an overgrown path. It looked like it used to be gravel, but the years had not been kind to what men had once built, and the road had sunk back into the dirt and brush it had once smothered.</p><p>Something about the finality of that made Dean shudder.</p><p>Dean killed the lights and cut the engine as soon as the barn started to come into view, letting the Impala’s heavy steel frame roll silently forward until they felt like they were close enough. They used to try parking far away, but had been burned one too many times while trying to make a quick getaway.</p><p>And still, they weren’t fully sure what they were dealing with. Well, Dean was. The vampire mime theory was a damn good one, and he stood by it.</p><p>The barn rose out of the earth at a slant, as though the only thing keeping it together was spite for the land it sat on, and hatred for those who left it to rot. The paint had chipped away and blackened with age. Dark mildew clung to the gaps between the planks of wood, smelling both sickly sweet and rancid at the same time, like meat starting to turn. The ground surrounding the barn was dry and cracked and gouged, and it was clear nothing had grown here in decades – and likely never would again.</p><p>Like the road that led to it, nature was trying to reclaim this barn; the building wasn’t going down easily, but nature was patient. It would outlast every futile attempt to fight against it – it just had to wait.</p><p>Every inch of the place made uneasiness settle deep into Dean’s bones.</p><p>“This the place?” Sam said, climbing out of the Impala.</p><p>“Let’s see. It’s dark, creepy, and looks like something straight out of Wes Craven’s erotic fantasy? Yeah, it’s a hundred percent the place.” Dean shrugged off the uneasiness, rolling his shoulders and feeling the weight of his jacket ground him in the moment.</p><p>The air in late November in the Midwest should be crisp and sharp and fresh – but here, in this long-forgotten pocket off the edge of a deteriorating highway, the air hung heavy and stale. In the distance, he could hear the slow, climbing static of wind rustling through the trees, though it didn’t occur to him that there was no breeze at all, no hinted breath of any movement, no source for the noise.</p><p>Dean dug around in the trunk, frowning after Sam <em>totally dismissed</em> his suggestion they bring the shurikens. They both opted for machetes instead. On a whim, Dean tucked a gun loaded with dead man’s blood-soaked bullets into his waistband.</p><p>They crept down the embankment off the side of the path, picking their way through the thick briars and rolling onto the balls of their feet to soften the crinkle of dead leaves underfoot. Dean led the way, the only light to guide him coming from the moonlight glinting off the hilt of his bloodstained blade.</p><p>The humid air grew thicker and thicker as they approached. The dilapidated barn loomed over Dean with a sneer, and he felt his pulse quicken with every step. The combination was making it difficult to breathe.</p><p>Just a few yards away from the entrance, Dean stiffened and threw up a hand to Sam’s chest, stopping him in his tracks.</p><p>“Dean?” Sam whispered, glancing around nervously. “What is it?”</p><p>Dean’s stare was fixed on the barn.</p><p>“What the fuck is that?” Dean said, pointing at the side of the building.</p><p>What had just looked like mildew stains and wet, weathered wood from a distance had started to take a much different shape as they drew closer. A dark, viscous liquid seeped out from between every gap in the planks, every eye in the wood, thick and slow like oil. The ooze pulsed and squirmed as though it had a heartbeat of its own.</p><p>As though it were <em>alive</em>.</p><p>“What is what?” Sam asked.</p><p>The air became suffocating, weighed down with rot and decay. Dean could feel it gathering in his lungs and pressing down on his shoulders, trying to force him to his knees. The sludge had started to pool around the desolate, cracked ground of the barn, and Dean knew it would eventually spread to where they were standing. It felt inevitable. <em>Nature is patient</em>.</p><p>“<em>That</em>,” Dean hissed through clenched teeth. “That… black stuff.”</p><p>Sam squinted and leaned to peer over Dean’s head.</p><p>“Dean, what are you talking about?”</p><p>“It’s <em>right there</em>, Sam! Look!” He grabbed a fistful of Sam’s jacket and yanked him forward, pointing. He could feel his frustration curling down his arm and into his fingertips, tightening his grip. Dean could hear his own heartbeat now, every rhythmic pump of blood echoing in his ears and pounding in his jaw.</p><p>“I don’t see anything.” Concern tipped the edges of Sam’s hesitant voice.</p><p>“What do you mean you don’t—“</p><p>
  <em>Dean.</em>
</p><p>He froze. An urgent, rough whisper arrowed through his thoughts, piercing through his frustration and panic.</p><p>
  <em>Run.</em>
</p><p>Dean opened his fist, letting go of Sam’s jacket and turning toward the barn.</p><p>“Cas?” Dean wasn’t whispering anymore. His voice rose with his pulse. “Cas?!”</p><p>Now it was Sam’s turn to grab his jacket. He closed his hand around Dean’s arm, trying to hold him back. “Dean, wait—“</p><p>“Cas is in there,” Dean’s voice wavered, growing manic with desperation. He tore his arm out of Sam’s grasp and stepped forward. “<em>CAS!”</em></p><p>“Dean, snap out of it!” Sam slung his arms under Dean’s armpits to restrain him. “Cas is <em>gone.</em>”</p><p>“<em>No,</em>” the word ripped from Dean’s chest in a voice he barely recognized as his own. Dean clawed at Sam’s hands and twisted around like a feral animal wrestling to escape a trap. Dean wasn’t just unhinged, he was unraveling at the seams and he could feel every carefully placed stitch pulling loose.</p><p>Dean finally broke free, wrenching out of Sam’s hold and – ignoring Castiel’s rough and urgent warning – surged forward into a sprint. He could barely hear Sam’s footsteps as his brother took off after him – the only sound he could make out now was the static rising to greet him. Rising to welcome him home.</p><p>He burst into the barn, turning his body sideways to squeeze into the gap between the doors without slowing down. Dean glanced around frantically in the dark, fumbling to switch on his flashlight.</p><p>Sam beat him to it. A light clicked on next to him just as he managed to get his working. The barn was hardly the place anyone, monster or not, would want to set up shop. The place was covered in cobwebs, as if even the spiders had given up on this place. The building seemed unstable, with the support beams creaking under its own weight. The dust settled like thick, gray snowdrifts on every surface.</p><p>But yet, no monsters were inside. Hell, it didn’t look like much of anything had lived in here for a long time. And there was no sign of Cas.</p><p>Dean felt his heart sink into his gut. He should’ve known this was another one of his Purgatory-era hallucination specials. Cas was gone. It was about time he accepted that.</p><p>Sam didn’t question him about the outburst, or the idiotic frenzied sprint into what they thought was a nest of vampires ready to protect their prey. He just gave Dean a pitying look and poked around the barn, looking for any evidence they could use to track down those two missing kids.</p><p><em>The kids. Right.</em> That’s what this had been about. Not his delusional reveries of Cas being alive. Dean leaned back against one of the posts and slid down to the ground, careful to avoid getting snagged on any nails or splinters jutting out from the wood. Anger and self-loathing bubbled up in the back of his throat, and he could taste the sting of it on his tongue. How could he be so selfish? He knew why. He’d always been this way. Just a killer with no empathy or remorse. A killer who didn’t deserve love from someone like Cas. A killer who deserved to die dirty and alone and broken in a fight he finally couldn’t win.</p><p>He rested his face in his hands, all the fight draining out of him. He felt like he had nothing left to give.</p><p>That is, until something shuffled in one of the stalls. Dean’s hand instantly fell to the handle of his machete. He jolted up just as Sam whirled on his heel to face the stall door.</p><p>Dean rose to his feet, standing guard behind Sam as his brother steeled himself. Sam wrapped one hand around the door handle, gripped his machete with the other, and pulled.</p><p>The door peeled back to reveal two young kids huddled together in the dark.</p><p>Dean blinked. The world didn’t seem to make sense. All signs pointed toward them being in the absolute <em>wrong</em> place, and to the coin flip idea having gone awry. But here they were, fortune having been on their side after all, with the two missing kids safe and sound right in front of them.</p><p>Well, almost.</p><p>“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Dean mumbled, the reassuring words just tumbling out of his mouth after an entire childhood, an entire lifetime of practice. The man who’d been trained to be a killer, whose every nerve had been broken and reshaped in the art of taking a life, had words of comfort arise as his deepest instinct. He reached out his hand, palm up, unthreatening into the stall. The two boys recoiled, the older one curling protectively around his brother – an act that sat all too familiar with Dean.</p><p>Dean stooped and set down his machete. The two kids watched cautiously as Dean kicked the blade far away, the machete skidding across the ground in a spray of dust. He held up his palms to show he meant no harm. Sam backed off, unwilling to drop his blade, and looked around for the vamps. After all, this <em>had</em> turned out to be their nest. Or, at least, their lunchbox.</p><p>“I’m Dean,” he said, dropping into a crouch to get down on their level. “That’s my little brother, Sammy. We’re gonna get you out of here.”</p><p>The youngest boy started to reach out to take Dean’s hand, but his older brother still eyed Dean with unease. The boy’s gaze flicked to Sam disbelievingly, then back to Dean.</p><p>Dean just smiled and let out a laugh. “Trust me, kid. He’s still my ‘little’ brother no matter how tall he gets. But it’s still my job to protect him, just like it’s your job to protect your little brother too.”</p><p>The boy visibly relaxed a little, his shoulders dropping. He nodded and let go of his little brother, who lurched forward and tackled Dean in a hug. Dean smiled – the first genuine one in what felt like eons – and patted the kid on the back.</p><p>“Alright, c’mon, we gotta get out of here.”</p><p>“Dean,” Sam hissed out of the corner of his mouth.</p><p>Dean knew that tone. He’d heard it a thousand times before on a thousand different hunts. It carried a very “Poughkeepsie” vibe.</p><p>Oh, son of a <em>bitch</em>.</p><p>Dean didn’t turn around. He looked at the older boy and pointed at the machete he’d kicked across the floor. “Take that knife,” he said, grabbing the boy’s shoulder and looking him in the eye. “Lock yourself in the car out front. Protect him,” he tilted his head toward the younger boy. “Now <em>run.</em>”</p><p>The older boy looked shell-shocked. It was his younger brother who actually moved first. The younger kid practically flung himself toward the machete, grabbed his older brother’s arm, and dragged him forward. The older boy followed his lead. The pair squeezed through the small gap in the back door and vanished into the night.</p><p>Dean stood and spun slowly around, coming face to face with seven monsters in in skull-clown masks. They were wildly outnumbered.</p><p>Dean was suddenly very glad he’d stuffed that gun into his jeans now that his machete was gone. He had a clip of seven rounds, with an extra loaded into the chamber for luck. He wasn’t the quickest draw, but he could at least cull the playing field down to a much fairer fight. <em>But then what?</em></p><p>Sam stood next to him, tensed and with his machete raised. Dean reached around his back and rested his hand on the grip of his Colt. The smooth, well-worn ivory had a cold familiarity in his hand. It normally felt like power, like survival.</p><p>But this time, he just felt empty.</p><p>The vamps stood there in a semi-circle, watching them. None of them moved to follow the kids. Really, none of them moved at all. Honestly, it was terrifying. But Dean knew a surefire way to deal with his fear: bury it.</p><p>“What is this, some kind of freaky foreplay?” he raised his eyebrows and elbowed Sam playfully, who shot him a look mixed with a special blend of astonished exasperation and fear. “Don’t tell me you’re not just <em>dying</em> to get a piece of this.” He gestured down his body, and flashed the monsters a half-grin. “<em>C’mon</em>.”</p><p>The vampires were wearing masks that covered their entire faces, but he could hear them snarl and knew the unmistakable wet grinding sound of their fangs scraping over their human teeth.</p><p>One of them stepped forward, knife raised, and before Sam could flinch, Dean fired three shots into the crowd. Two of the shots hit their marks – one in the thigh of the vamp who’d stepped forward, and the second shattering the kneecap of another into bloodied gravel. The vampire yowled in pain and crumpled to the ground.</p><p>The third shot missed, burying itself into the wooden pillar next to another vamp’s waist -- but two out of three ain't bad. Dean raised his pistol up to his mouth, winked, and blew the tip of the barrel in a kind of wanton challenge.</p><p>The monsters took the bait.</p><p>The remaining five surged forward. Dean ducked back and spun under Sam’s arm just as his brother swung his machete forward – a move they’d practiced and perfected over years of hunting together. By this point, they barely needed to speak or signal; they moved like clockwork.</p><p>The blade made contact, slicing right through the throat of a vampire that Dean realized had been just inches from him – it was sometimes easy to forget just how <em>fast</em> these monsters could move.</p><p>The vampire’s head tipped back and tore free, tumbling to the floor with a heavy thud and sending a spray of blood through the air.</p><p>Dean continued his momentum around Sam, making sure nothing was behind them before re-emerging on his brother’s other side. He fired at a vamp, hitting them right in the heart with a dead man’s blood bullet and dropping them to the floor.</p><p>But as soon as he’d fired, another vamp grabbed Dean’s right wrist and yanked back hard, flexing his hand back and forcing him to reflexively drop the pistol.</p><p>“Sam!” Dean yelled, gritting his teeth and twisting his arm to try and wrestle free from the monster’s grip before they could break his wrist.</p><p>“Little busy!” Sam shouted back, fending off the other remaining two vampires as they worked to corner him.</p><p>Dean balled his left hand into a fist and clocked the vampire right in the jaw, knocking off their mask. <em>Fuck, that hurt</em>. He’d definitely have bruised and bloodied knuckles tomorrow from a move like that. <em>If you make it to tomorrow</em>, his thoughts unhelpfully – and a little too hopefully – offered.</p><p>He threw his knee up into the vamp’s groin, and though they curled in on themselves slightly, it was obvious the move didn’t do what Dean had expected it to. It was only then did he get a good look at who he was fighting – a narrow-faced woman with long, dark hair, and who was strikingly familiar.</p><p>She wasted no time in analyzing him back. The vampire hissed, baring her fangs and shoving Dean to the ground. His head snapped back, grazing the dusted concrete foundation, and he caught a glimpse of Sam wrestling with the one remaining vampire he’d yet to kill. The other one’s severed head lay a few feet away from Dean’s face, its jaw still reflexively snapping at the air as blood pooled around it.</p><p>Dean coughed both from the impact and from the shroud of dust that billowed up around him. The vampire descended down on top of him, ferocity lining her every feature. She pressed her forearm down on Dean’s throat, pinning him to the ground and cutting his breath short. The vampire grabbed his face under his chin, digging her nails into his cheek and forcing him to look at her. “Remember me, Winchester?” she snarled.</p><p>Dean blinked hard through the dust and the specks of darkness starting to web in the edges of his vision. He clawed at the arm on his throat, but the vampire held firm. With every half-breath Dean gulped in, he felt his strength fade a little more.</p><p>The vampire reveled in the way Dean scrabbled at her grip, sputtering and desperate for air. “Well?” she asked, leaning in closer. Her lower jaw quivered and clicked her fangs together as she drank in the scent of his fear. She took a long breath, and an envious rage unfurled deep in Dean’s chest. “Do you?”</p><p>An answer formed in Dean’s throat, a word he gasped and stammered to get out. “G-j… e…” She backed her arm off enough for him to speak, and the air – the thick, humid, reeks-of-decay air – came rushing back into Dean’s lungs.</p><p>“Go fuck yourself,” he spat out between coughs.</p><p>Her face twisted with fury. She hissed and tightened her grip on Dean’s face, embedding her nails in his cheek.</p><p>“I forget how weak and stupid you humans are,” she mused, curling her lip up in disdain. “A vampire never forgets a scent, though I doubt even a dumb mangy ‘wolf could forget a Winchester stench.”</p><p>“Wh-“ Dean gasped. “Who are you?” He dragged out his words a little longer than he needed to, buying some time. He no longer had his machete, or his gun, and he couldn’t hear Sam behind him anymore. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.</p><p>Dean kept one hand on the vampire’s arm at his neck, and walked the fingers of his free hand slowly down to his pocket. The vampire didn’t seem to notice.</p><p>She sighed, and though she feigned annoyance, there was an undeniable twinge of anger in the gesture.</p><p>“I remember <em>you</em>,” she growled. She twined her fingers in his hair, and suddenly yanked his head up and slammed it into the concrete. The pain seared into his skull and stars spotted the edge of his vision.</p><p>“I remember you ruining my life!” Her voice grew unstable as she rammed Dean’s skull into the floor again.</p><p>“I remember you being too late to save me.” She choked out the words, her tone shifting from rage to despair. She lifted his head again, and Dean felt blood matting in his hair. “Too late to stop Luther.”</p><p>Maybe it was her beating his head into the ground, or maybe it was her words, but a decade-old name reeled out of the fog that had become Dean’s thoughts.</p><p>“J-Jenny?”</p><p>She shoved his head into the concrete. Dean’s vision swam. His head ached and his lungs burned, and the ringing in his ears started to sound a lot like radio static. He could feel his hand in his pocket, could feel the cool metal of something he was reaching for – something he couldn’t quite remember now.</p><p>
  <em>Dean.</em>
</p><p>Dean’s world snapped back into focus. The whisper, <em>Cas’s</em> whisper, sent new strength surging into his body, sharpening his thoughts, reigniting his soul.</p><p>
  <em>Dean. Sunlight.</em>
</p><p>Jenny froze, her eyes blown wide. She stared at Dean, her jaw falling slack, her fangs retracting involuntarily over her teeth. She said nothing, but Dean suddenly knew the truth of what had just happened deep in his bones.</p><p>She heard Cas too.</p><p>And that changed everything.</p><p>Dean’s fist closed around the metal object in his pocket. He yanked it out, flicked the switch, and shined the flashlight’s bright UV bulb right in Jenny’s face.</p><p>The vampire screamed and recoiled, leaping off of Dean like she’d been burned. She threw her hands over her eyes, and shuffled backward. Dean scrambled to his feet, keeping the light squarely on Jenny.</p><p>“You heard that?” Dean shouted. “Tell me you heard that!”</p><p>He had to know. Had to know for certain it meant what he already knew it did. Cas was here. He could reach him, somehow. And this vampire was his first lead. His <em>only</em> lead.</p><p>An anxious hope flared through every nerve in Dean’s body. This could be it, this could be the first step in getting Cas back, could be his only hope to finding him, to undoing the damage he’d done, to finally telling him that he—</p><p>And that’s when the machete blade came swinging toward Jenny’s throat.</p><p>“Sam, <em>no!</em>”</p><p>The shout ripped from Dean, raw and desperate, pounding in his ears. The static rose to meet him, twining around his legs and burrowing its grainy thorns into his thoughts.</p><p>He couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, and the next few movements didn’t quite feel like they were entirely his own.</p><p>It was too late for Sam to stop – he was in mid-swing, the machete blade just inches from severing Dean’s only real connection to Cas for good.</p><p>Dean dove to the ground, sliding across the floor – a floor that used to be bone-dry and caked with decades of dust, but was now darkened and smeared with blood. In one swift movement, he scooped up his discarded pistol, pointed it at Jenny’s knee, and fired.</p><p>The vampire shrieked and dropped to the ground like a stone, the machete just grazing her dark hair as she fell beneath the blade’s arc.</p><p>“What the <em>hell,</em> Dean?” Sam shouted.</p><p>“Drop the blade,” Dean said from where he lay on the ground, breathing hard. He was still pointing the pistol at Jenny.</p><p>“You could’ve shot me! I <em>had</em> it!” Sam pointed the tip of the machete at Jenny, who was now rocking on the floor, sobbing and clutching her the shredded remnants of her knee.</p><p>Something wild glinted in Dean’s eyes. He rose to his feet, this time turning the barrel of the gun on his brother.</p><p>“I said, drop it.” Dean’s voice was steady, but he felt entirely unhinged. His heart threw itself against his ribs and he could hear every beat reverberate in the static in his ears. A static that seemed incredibly pleased he was threatening to take his own brother’s life, to destroy the only family he had left, to sever his oldest tie and send that sacrificial blood pouring into the desolate, drought-cracked earth.</p><p>His lungs struggled to suck in a breath as the air condensed with filth and rot. The black ooze that had been dripping from the outside of the barn now hung in thick strands from the rafters and pooled along the floor in the edges of Dean’s vision. The dense, wet wood of the barn trapped the smell of decay within its stifling walls like ice traps the dark water, and all those unlucky enough to fall into it, below the surface.</p><p>And a man denied air, a man forced into a primal desperation, was a man hijacked and controlled.</p><p>The static around Dean – the one he’d mistaken for a harmless breeze rustling in the trees – started to form whispers of encouragement in a cacophony of clashing languages he didn’t know, yet still understood. They spoke them in a thousand stolen tongues, with words swollen with betrayal and loss. And yet, every single one of them was urging him to pull the trigger.</p><p><em>It would be so easy</em>, the static seemed to say. Its intention came more as a feeling, an innate knowledge, than as words. <em>Just squeeze the trigger, and it’ll all be over. You’ll have the peace you want. And so will I.</em></p><p>Sam didn’t drop the blade.</p><p>“D-don’t,” Jenny hissed through clenched teeth. “Don’t listen to it.”</p><p>Sam’s steeled defiance shifted to something uncertain. Sam didn’t know who – or what – she was referring to. He couldn’t hear anything but Dean. He eyed his older brother with a new wariness and distrust that, in any other scenario, would’ve cut Dean to his core.</p><p>Instead, Dean cocked the gun.</p><p>“It’s <em>lying</em>,” Jenny said, her voice strained through the pain. She was pulling herself back to stand, using a piece of rebar that was jutting out from a pillar to drag herself up.</p><p>Dean could feel the static radiating down into his fingertips, coaxing his grip tighter on the trigger. Every fiber of his being screamed for him to stop, to set down the gun, to save his brother’s life. But whatever had its tendrils entwined into Dean’s thoughts, whispering empty promises in his ear of peace and of an end to his grief, was stronger.</p><p>Dean squeezed his eyes shut, took a shuddering breath, and fired.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Interlude</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>hey, Cas.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Out here, the Dead don’t have names.</p><p>Not anymore, at least.</p><p>It was cold. It was wet. But most of all, it was empty.</p><p>It was a place for those with nowhere to go. For lost souls with no one to claim them, to waste away in an eternal dark slumber until there was nothing left. Unlike Heaven, or Hell, or Purgatory with its infinite torturous cycle of death and rebirth, there was no eternity here.</p><p>The moment you stopped being remembered, or missed, or grieved, you were lost to the ether. Like the sun dipping below the vast, lonesome horizon of the ocean, when the light was gone, so were you.</p><p><em>The sun</em>.</p><p>The thought snagged Castiel’s attention away from where he drifted through a familiar, cold darkness. Something nudged at the edges of his consciousness – something bright and burning and brimming with promise – something that reminded him of the sun.</p><p>What was that again?</p><p>He didn’t remember much outside of the primordial ooze he seemed to be floating through at the moment. He tried to move, but couldn’t quite figure out how. Castiel tried to look down and inspect his hands, but his nerves responded about as well as rusted gears. The sheer memory of his hands blurred in his brain. <em>Hands</em>, his mind overenunciated, tasting the word as though it were an interesting new food, full of nuance and odd flavors. He poured all of his focus into conjuring the image of his hands, but all he could see was dark. <em>Curious</em>.</p><p>He tried to repeat the word again, but found it had drifted out of his grasp.</p><p>Castiel floated on, numb. This place was cold and wet and devoid of any and all meaning, and though it was far from peaceful, it was the most at peace Castiel had ever felt.</p><p>Except – something painful, a fresh vapor trail through his memories, tugged at his consciousness. He squinted at it, but could only make out a smear of green, the crisp of pine, and a hinted rumble of grease and well-worn leather.</p><p>It was vague. It felt so distant, the memory silhouetted at the wavering surface leagues above the deep water he was sinking through.</p><p>But it was still enough to make his heart ache. <em>Ache. I feel… I </em>feel. Hm. That was … perplexing. He shouldn’t be able to feel at all.</p><p>Something bright shimmered up ahead. <em>Ah yes, the sun.</em></p><p>No, not the sun. Another memory?</p><p>It grew brighter and brighter as he drew closer until the sheer sight of it scorched the void around it away.</p><p>The bright star of light shone with a thousand colors Castiel didn’t have words for in any human language. It pulsed and burned with an enrapturing amount of passion and energy. <em>A soul</em>.</p><p>The most beautiful soul Castiel had ever seen. He stared at it, mesmerized.</p><p>“<em>Cas.”</em></p><p>The word drifted out from the glimmering orb and hooked into his thoughts. It seemed familiar, as though it carried a gravity with it most other words did not. It felt … like a name, but more personal. Like it belonged to him.</p><p>He quite liked it.</p><p>
  <em>“It should have been me, Cas.”</em>
</p><p>His heartache suddenly grew more intense with the words, as though they were directed at him. <em>Were they?</em></p><p>He instinctively reached out to cup the soul gingerly in his hands. Ah, hands. There they were. He would have marveled at the first sight of his corporeal form since … (since he entered this place?) but he was too transfixed by the shimmering ball of light to care.</p><p>The soul was so incredibly beautiful. And yet, when his hands ever so gently skimmed the edges of its glimmer, the sadness woven within every strand of light reached out and crushed Castiel’s heart.</p><p><em>“You should have let me die,” </em>it whispered to him.<em> “You didn’t deserve this.”</em></p><p><em>No,</em> Castiel desperately tried to remember how to speak, how to form words so he could soothe this soul. To make it see how righteous and earth-shatteringly <em>good</em> it was. Tears of frustration and despondence stung Castiel’s eyes. This soul’s sadness was an <em>injustice</em>.</p><p>Every one of his nerves screamed to be able to cradle this soul to his chest and convince it that it deserved the world. Castiel had walked the earth since the dawn of time, since the Sahara was flooded and teeming with life, since the first fish defied the natural order and dragged itself out of the ocean, risking death in search of some freedom greater than itself. He’d seen the first moments of creation and death, bore witness to the birth of joy and betrayal. He’d observed countless stories of love and loss through the eternal tides of time and yet – nothing compared to this.</p><p>This soul, despite its jagged cracks, was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. And its hopelessness tore at his heart with claws serrated with empty promises and shattered reverie.</p><p><em>Heart. Eyes. Tears. Hands.</em> <em>Nerves.</em> Castiel was materializing into something whole once again, the pain and hurt and memory of it all stitching his physical form back together from where his consciousness had been adrift.</p><p><em>“There’s nothing for me here,” </em>the soul pulsed with a movement akin to a sob, had it had a body to inhabit.<em> “Not without—”</em></p><p>The voice had been interrupted, but the thought had finished wordlessly.</p><p>
  <em>Not without you.</em>
</p><p>“D-Dean.” The word dragged forth from Castiel’s throat in the desperate rasp of a dying man who knew he was lost beyond reach, beyond rescue, but needed to make his final peace out loud with the world as his only witness. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead in toward the light, taking a shaky breath – his first breath in what had felt like eons.</p><p>A breath that brought the reek of decay into his lungs.</p><p>Something was horribly wrong.</p><p>Castiel’s eyes snapped open. The soul he cradled that was brimming with light and a steely resolve to do right by a world that never would do right by it, now flickered and faded in his grasp. Thick, dark tendrils of shadowy briar slowly unfurled and reached their gnarled vines like clasping hands around the light, intent on snuffing out this stubborn match of a soul.</p><p>Castiel refused to recoil from where the needle-sharp barbs of the vines hooked and ripped into the flesh of his hands. The darkness of the Empty swelled around him and reveled in the spilling of blood and desperation and grief, feeding off of Castiel’s pain like a swarm of starving mosquitoes in the summertime.</p><p>He could feel it toying with him. The Empty dangled Dean’s soul in front of Castiel like an anglerfish, drawing his delicious anguish up to the surface only to sink its parasitic teeth in and take its fill.</p><p>Every spot the Empty bit and tore at Castiel’s skin with its shadowy brambles blistered and bled and itched in mockery of his mourning. And yet, he defied it. He refused to let go. There wasn’t a force in existence strong enough to make him choose anything else. There was only one remaining universal truth Castiel knew for certain: he would choose Dean over everything else – his own torture, his own peace, his own life – over and over again. He would hold on until he physically couldn’t, until something tore him away by force.</p><p>The Empty could torture him, but it could not break him. Greater forces than it had tried, and failed, in the past.</p><p>The thought sparked a shiver of rage through the Empty. The damp pool of black oil he’d been standing in churned into a thick, angry mud, roiling and pulling him down and away from the ball of light. The briars turned into a thousand claws that raked down Castiel’s body, shredding his skin and spilling a blood that carried no more secrets.</p><p>There was a power in that, in unwavering truth. A power the Empty could not fathom. Castiel took solace in that knowledge as the Empty convulsed into a frenzy of needles and knives and claws.</p><p>It took all of Castiel’s waning strength to grit his teeth and hold on to the flickering light. He dug the tips of his fingers into the soul – <em>Dean’s</em> soul – and choked out the only word he could muster, hoping his urgent warning would somehow worm its way into Dean’s consciousness.</p><p>“<em>Run.</em>”</p><p>For what seemed like the thousandth time in a world filled with powerful entities intent on tearing them apart, Dean slipped out of Castiel’s grasp, and the suffocating oily tar of the Empty drowned Castiel once more into nothing.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>dean's soul is shrimp colors</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The scars of this land bore all the hallmarks of what a farm shouldn’t be. Of one that ended more life than it grew; of one that spilled more blood into the ground than it did water, and sowed its fields with gristle and bone.</p><p>And when it had taken one too many souls from these woods, the darkness had come to collect.</p><p>To an outsider, this would look like any old, failed farm left to rot, the previous owners abandoning their dreams and livelihoods with the land. But those who live nearby know better.</p><p>They know there’s an odd feeling around these parts. They know how the darkness creeps in further than it should, often winning out against any meager attempt to light your way. It’s silent save for the footsteps and breath of any unlucky stranger who wanders too close. A lone cricket will hesitantly chirp every now and then. But otherwise, it’s empty. You hear everything, and nothing. Just the inexplicable static of silence that’s somehow loud enough to drown out everything else.</p><p>It’s as though there’s a rule only told in whispers. <em>Remember!</em> The people here must say. <em>Don’t go near the farmhouse! Don’t listen too hard to the silence! Don’t look at the shadows that aren’t your own!</em></p><p>There was no longer any life here, nor was there death. But there’s something powerful and ominous that lurks in the in-between – something that swims along the vast, empty crevices and fleeting moments that straddle this world and the next. Something that travels along the seams, gnawing at the threads of life, and sewing in its own slime trail of decay.</p><p>Somewhere along the way, the story of what had happened to this farm, and what now inhabited it, were lost. There was just one unspoken knowledge passed down quietly among all those who were born here, a knowledge as intrinsic as how to blink and how to breathe.</p><p>A knowledge that all those lured into that cursed place were already, irrevocably, lost.</p><p>But Sam and Dean were strangers to this land. They didn’t know the significance of this particular spot in the Midwest, one that was born of the blood of men sacrificed to war, to commerce, to steel. Men sacrificed for causes far too eager to trade their lives for strips of paper; men sent to die for causes stained with the oily residue of a callous greed. It was a gruesome mixture of exploitation and needless sacrifice that was too tantalizing for an Old God – one of the oldest there was – to ignore.</p><p>And Dean, already lost before he even stepped foot onto this land where nothing grew and nothing ever would again, never stood a chance. The old, empty god whispered sweet promises into Dean’s ear and wrapped its thorny, parasitic vines around his soul, and Dean wrapped his finger tight around the trigger of his gun in agreement.</p><p>Dean pointed the gun at his brother, the charge he’d sworn to protect with his own life, and fired.</p><p>Dark forces have a way of controlling the mechanics of flesh and blood and bone, but their reach does not extend to the deadly forces forged by human hands. And a lot can go wrong with homemade bullets, crudely crafted by hands shaky with the fog of alcohol, and a mind too grief-stricken to notice it’d poured far too much powder into the cartridge.</p><p>It took a moment for Dean to realize the scream in pain he’d heard was his own. The Colt exploded in Dean’s hand. Shrapnel shredded the flesh of his fingers, shards of metal and plastic embedding into his bloodied mess of a hand. Deep in his mind, whatever had twined its brambles to choke out his thoughts shrieked in pain and recoiled.</p><p>Dean dropped the now destroyed gun and its pieces clattered to the floor.</p><p>It was the same gun he’d carried for at least a decade, always keeping him and Sam safe on their hunts. And yet, the second he’d turned it onto his brother, it backfired – and destroyed itself instead. Dean dropped to his knees next to the wreckage of his gun and clutched his shredded hand to his chest.</p><p>“Dean!” Sam shouted, lunging forward to Dean’s side. He grabbed Dean’s shoulders, but Dean wouldn’t look up.</p><p>“Sam, I- get away from me.” He winced as he tried to wrench his shoulders out of Sam’s grasp. He felt drained of strength. “I don’t want to hurt you.”</p><p>“I know, it’s okay,” Sam said, trying to soothe him.</p><p>“I—fuck.” Dean gritted his teeth as a new wave of pain surged up his arm. Fuck, this was a lot of blood. “I was going to – I <em>did</em> – shoot…” Dean trailed off, trading his words for a pained groan.</p><p>“It wasn’t <em>you</em>,” a third voice offered.</p><p>Dean finally lifted his head, squinting as Jenny came into focus. She was leaning against one of the pillars in the barn, keeping the weight off of her broken kneecap.</p><p>“It was … <em>It</em>.” Her eyes darkened. “It’s back.”</p><p>“What is?” Sam asked. He didn’t turn around, instead focusing on getting Dean’s hand to stop bleeding. Sam pulled a roll of gauze out of his pocket – something Jody had <em>insisted</em> one of them carry with them on hunts for precisely this reason – and wrapped it tightly around Dean’s hand. Luckily, he didn’t lose any fingers – but this was gonna be a bitch to heal.</p><p>Sam glanced up at Dean, clearly expecting an answer. He had quickly figured out there was something Dean hadn’t been telling him – something this vampire seemed to have been clued in on before he was.</p><p>“I don’t … I don’t know,” Dean said. It was the truth. He hadn’t quite realized something sinister was pulling his strings until now. His head throbbed in tune with his injured hand, but the static was gone. He felt in control again. “Whatever the son of a bitch is, it’s out of me.”</p><p>“Mmm, I wouldn’t be so sure,” Jenny offered. “It may have let you go for now, but it’ll come back. It always does.”</p><p>“What do you mean? Dean was possessed?” Sam studied Dean’s face for a moment, and Dean felt like Algernon in that lab. “It can’t be a demon, what about a ghost?”</p><p>“Aw,” Jenny cooed, mockingly. “A ghost! That’s cute.”</p><p>Sam finished bandaging Dean’s hand and whirled around, his face scrunched up with anger. “Tell me what you know,” Sam snarled. “Or you’ll end up like the rest of your nest.” He tilted his head toward the bodies strewn across the barn.</p><p>“Dude, what you’re messing with here is <em>way</em> bigger than you know. I don’t know exactly what <em>it</em> is, but trust me – it’s fucking horrifying.” She threw out her hands. “And I’m saying this as someone who basically eats people.”</p><p>Dean sat up a little straighter, squeezing his hand to his collarbone to help stop the bleeding. The injury wasn’t too bad. He’d be okay. Dean steadied his breath. “You heard him, didn’t you?”</p><p>Jenny paused for a moment. “I heard a voice, but I don’t think it was the same one you heard.”</p><p>
  <em>No, no, no. If she didn’t hear Cas, that meant –</em>
</p><p>“I heard Kate.”</p><p>Dean’s heart sank. His vision swam, but it had nothing to do with a loss of blood. He didn’t ask who the hell she was talking about – it didn’t matter. It wasn’t Cas, it never was, Cas was gone.</p><p>Realization dawned on Sam’s face. “And you heard Cas.”</p><p>Dean didn’t acknowledge Sam’s question with a response, but the way he stiffened his jaw and avoided Sam’s eyes was still a clear answer.</p><p>Sam turned back to Jenny. “Is Kate…?”</p><p>“Dead? Yeah,” she narrowed her eyes. “I’m sure of it.”</p><p>“So what are we dealing with?”</p><p>Jenny shrugged. “Something old. <em>Really</em> old. This isn’t the only place it’s cropped up. I first ran across it near an old ghost town by Buena Vista, Colorado. Then again a few years later in West Virginia by the mines,” she said, wrapping her arms tight around herself. “But for some reason it’s the strongest here.”</p><p>Dean watched as Sam rocked back and forth on his heels and tapped his fingers against his thumb in thought. <em>Kid’s probably itching for a library right now. Or a computer.</em> His brother always loved the mystery of a hunt much more than Dean did, and had always been much better at compartmentalizing the horrors they encountered by tucking them into the pages of a book.</p><p>The pain in his hand had dulled to a numb ache. He wanted so badly to be back in the bunker and out of this hellhole. He’d only agreed to a hunt to distract himself from what had happened to Cas – what he’d <em>caused</em> to happen – but all this had done was remind him over and over that Cas was gone, and he was the reason why.</p><p>He shook his head to clear his thoughts, and broke his silence.</p><p>“So what’s the deal with the whole insane clown posse shtick,” Dean asked. It was about time someone asked the <em>real</em> questions. “You know,” he waved his good hand around his face for emphasis, “the creepy mask shit.”</p><p>“Wouldn’t you like to know.”</p><p>This whole thing – him saving Jenny’s life, almost ending Sam’s, only for it all to be for nothing because she hadn’t heard Cas at all – only made the rage that was all too familiar to Dean bubble up in his throat. “Fucking useless,” he muttered.</p><p>Jenny just narrowed her eyes at him, contemplating the distance between the two of them and wondering if it was worth the pain in her knee to get into another fight.</p><p>“Dean, knock it off,” Sam scolded. “I know you’re hurt, and I’ve been trying to be patient with you and give you your space but there are <em>clearly</em> things you’re hiding from me. Like what the <em>hell </em>we’re dealing with.”</p><p>Dean finally met Sam’s eyes, fixing a glare in his direction.</p><p>“Because you’re not the only one dealing with this,” Sam continued. “We both are. We <em>both</em> lost Cas. I need you to see that.”</p><p>“Hate to interrupt what seems like such a lovely moment,” Jenny interjected. “But aren’t there like, two traumatized kids hiding in your car or something?”</p><p>Sam’s eyes widened. <em>Shit</em>. They’d nearly forgotten the entire reason they’d come here in the first place.</p><p>“I mean,” Jenny said, baring her teeth in an uncomfortable grin. “Unless you don’t mind me having a midnight snack.”</p><p>“What do we do?” Dean asked Sam, lowering his voice. He staggered to his feet. “We can’t leave her here, we can’t kill her… yet. She knows something,” Dean glanced up at Jenny, who waggled her fingers in a tauntingly gleeful wave. She wasn’t even pretending like she couldn’t hear them.</p><p>“And we can’t exactly put her in the car with those kids,” Sam finished.</p><p>“Right.”</p><p>“Aw, why not?” Jenny pouted mockingly. “It’ll be like a picnic! You even packed me a dinner.”</p><p>“You sure we can’t kill her?” Sam muttered.</p><p>Dean just glared. “Don’t make us break your other kneecap,” he threatened. Jenny fell quiet.</p><p>“We could just call this in,” Sam shrugged. “Leave right before the police—“</p><p>“<em>No</em>,” Dean cut him off forcefully. “No badges. They’ve already fucked this up enough. Those kids deserve to feel safe, and that sure as hell won’t be in a police station.”</p><p>“Well we can’t <em>stay</em> here, we can’t leave, what do you—“</p><p>“Hey, boys!” Jenny shouted.</p><p>“What about a neighbor’s house?” Dean said, ignoring Jenny’s outburst.</p><p>Sam mulled it over. “I didn’t see many houses here.”</p><p>“<em>Boys</em>.”           </p><p>“Do you think…?”</p><p>“Nah, it’d take her <em>hours</em> to drive to Ohio. What if—“</p><p>“Hey, <em>dumbasses</em>,” Jenny yelled, waving to get their attention. The two brothers snapped their heads around in surprise, almost as though they’d forgotten she was even there. She straightened and rolled her eyes. “I’ll just ride in the trunk.”</p><p>Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Sam shrugged. Dean sighed, reluctant, but gave in. <em>Blood on the carpeting back there is never easy to clean out.</em> “That could work.” They turned to head toward the car.</p><p>“Well?” Jenny said, gesturing her hands down at her mangled knee expectantly.</p><p>“Walk it off,” Dean grumbled. She was a vampire; the dead man’s blood had likely started to wear off by now. She was fine to limp around on her own. They’d left her alive, and that was enough of a courtesy by Dean’s standards.</p><p>Sam walked behind Jenny, keeping his machete pointed at her back to remind her not to try anything. But she didn’t – she limped quietly toward the Impala with an air of boredom more than anything else.</p><p>Jenny was playing it cool, but Dean had seen the look of total, paralyzing fear in her eyes when she heard Cas – scratch that, <em>Not</em>-Cas – speak. The Winchesters had probably killed more monsters over the years than any other pair of hunters and yet – this vampire was so scared of whatever was haunting this place she damn near volunteered to be their prisoner.</p><p>Dean tried not to think about that too hard.</p><p>When they made it out to the Impala, Dean was relieved to see the boys had done exactly what he’d told them. The older boy was passed out on the backseat – either from fear or exhaustion, or both – with his younger brother sitting rigid on the floor, machete clenched tight in his grip.</p><p>“Hey,” Dean waved through the window. The little boy nearly jumped out of his skin, but instantly relaxed when he recognized Dean. Dean walked around the Impala and slid into the driver’s seat. “Good job keeping your brother safe,” he said, nodding at where the other boy was sprawled out, still asleep.</p><p>The boy looked down at the machete like he’d just realized what he’d been holding this whole time. “I did what you said,” he said, his voice eerily calm and quiet as he stared unblinking at the blade. Poor kid had already been through hell, and now he had to live with <em>this</em>.</p><p>“You’re safe now,” Dean said, trying his best to sound comforting. He tapped into a vein of knowledge he hadn’t had to access since the day Sam turned 16 and started shutting both him, and their dad, out. “We’re gonna get you out of here.”</p><p>The Impala jostled suddenly as Sam tied up Jenny and shoved her into the trunk. The car dipped under the added weight before readjusting. The boy shot a worried look at Dean, who just shook his head dismissively. “That’s just Sammy putting away a few things.”</p><p>“Oh,” the kid said, pondering something. “I’m Dylan.”</p><p>“Okay, Dylan,” Dean said. “I need you to do one more brave thing okay?”</p><p>Dylan nodded.</p><p>“I’m gonna need you to tell me somewhere we can take you where you’ll be safe. Do you have any aunts or uncles or grandparents here?”</p><p>Dylan responded by elbowing his brother until he woke up. The boy bolted upright before making eye contact with Dean and scrambling back in a panic.</p><p>“Tommy,” Dylan said, still quiet. Tommy just drew his knees up into his chest and fixed a blank stare at his shoes. “<em>Tommy</em>.” Dylan waved his hand in front of his brother’s face. After a moment, Tommy looked up at his little brother, his eyes struggling to focus. “Where does Nana live?”</p><p>“W-what?” Tommy looked like he was really fighting to put the pieces together in his head. “Who … who’s askin’?”</p><p>“Dean’s gonna take us to Nana’s but I dunno where to go.”</p><p>Tommy blinked. And then it clicked. “Oh.” His shoulders dropped and he visibly relaxed a little as he looked up at Dean. “Yeah, I can tell you how to get there.”</p><p>“Awesome,” Dean said, and – with his voice shifting into a tone he often used with Jack – turned back to Dylan, who was still clutching the machete. “Now put that thing down before you hurt yourself, and put your seat belts on.”</p><p>Sam folded down into the passenger seat a moment later. “Jenny’s all tied—“</p><p>If Dean’s right hand wasn’t all mangled, he would’ve punched Sam hard in the shoulder. He opted for an especially intense <em>the-fuck-are-you-thinking</em> glare instead, and tilted his head sharply toward the kids in the backseat.</p><p>Sam immediately changed course. “Tiiiired. Jenny’s all tired, so she’s sleeping in the back?” He was trying, Dean’d give him that. But it sounded so freakin’ stupid.</p><p>“Who’s Jenny?” Dylan piped up, curious. He seemed to be getting pretty comfortable with all this. Tommy was now staring out the window, his gaze unfocused and seemingly a thousand miles away.</p><p>Dean opened his mouth to answer, but Sam rushed in, still flustered. “A… dog. We found her in there and we’re going to take her back to her owners.”</p><p>Dean looked at Sam, dumbfounded. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”</p><p>Sam just jutted out his chin and gave Dean a haughty look, unconvinced Dean could’ve done any better.</p><p>“That’s cool!” Dylan said. It made enough sense to him, to this little kid who’d just seen more murder and violence and blood than any kid should ever see in their lifetime. But this boy was too young to ever know the monsters under the bed weren’t <em>supposed</em> to be real. Dean hoped deep down these two would turn out okay, despite everything.</p><p>The Impala roared into life under his hand – Baby was gonna be a bitch and a half to drive one-handed, but he’d made do before – and he (awkwardly) shifted her into drive.</p><p>And as Dean pulled away from that goddamned barn, he swore he could see black vines pushing through the wooden planks and winding up the doorframe out of the corner of his eye. But when he glanced into the rearview mirror, there was nothing but night.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i've known dylan for approximately six paragraphs but if anything happened to him i would kill everyone in this room and then myself</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They dropped the kids off at their grandmother’s house with no incidents, though Dean had to check the floor of the backseat twice to make sure Dylan didn’t try to take the machete with him. Dean would’ve let the kid take it, but he was fairly certain the boy’s grandmother would’ve had a heart attack at the sight of her grandson brandishing a giant blood-stained knife on her porch in the middle of the night.</p><p>Begrudgingly, Dean let Jenny out of the trunk and – making sure her wrists were still bound – let her take the backseat. Thankfully, she’d taken the hint and kept her mouth shut while the kids were in the car.</p><p>“Where to now?” Sam asked. The drive until then had been mostly quiet, aside from Tommy mumbling out directions and Dylan fidgeting in the backseat.</p><p>Dean chewed the inside of his lip in thought. They hadn’t planned on staying another night – the hunt was supposed to be simple, and long over by now, with them grabbing some late-night pie and hitting the road back to Kansas. But, as always, this simple hunt had revealed itself to be some much Bigger Bad than they’d bargained for. He should’ve known.</p><p>“Should we go back to the—“</p><p>Fear spiked through Dean’s chest, burning down his forearms into his palms. He tightened his grip around the wheel. “<em>No,</em>” he said, with force.</p><p>“Dude, why are you being so weird about the motel?” Sam said, huffing a humorless laugh.</p><p>Dean didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the road in front of him, the knuckles of his hand turning white as he squeezed the steering wheel until he thought it would crack.</p><p>“Oh, no. You saw something there didn’t you?”</p><p>More silence. Dean set his jaw.</p><p>“<em>Dean</em>. You have to talk to me. You can’t keep hiding this stuff!” Sam pushed his hair back from his face in exasperation. “Unbelievable, dude.”</p><p>“Yeah, okay? Fine,” Dean snarled. “I saw something at the motel. You happy now?”</p><p>Sam opened his mouth to fire back a retort, but seemed to reconsider. He felt this escalating into another wildly unproductive fight. Dean’s wounds from Cas’s death were still raw, and jabbing at them wasn’t going to fix anything.</p><p>Instead, Sam sat back in his seat, letting the uncomfortable silence do the work for him.</p><p>It was several more moments before the quiet ate away enough to make Dean speak again.</p><p>“I saw Cas. Sortof,” Dean said. “In a dream.”</p><p>“At the motel?”</p><p>“No,” Dean swallowed. “Before.”</p><p>Sam spun sideways to face Dean. “Like a vision? <em>Dude—“</em></p><p>“I know what you mean,” Jenny piped up from the backseat. Sam and Dean both jumped, for a brief moment forgetting she was even back there until she spoke. “It did the same thing to me.”</p><p>Sam looked at her, surprised. Dean met her eyes in the rearview.</p><p>“It wasn’t long after Kate died,” she continued. “Luther was super broken up about it. The two of them had been together a really long time, I guess. He was desperate to bring her back. Like, really desperate. It was scaring some of the nest, people were talking about leaving and then…” Jenny trailed off, her voice wavering. “I saw her. In my dreams.”</p><p>“Who?” Sam asked.</p><p>“Kate,” Jenny said. “Only … she seemed <em>off</em>. Like…”</p><p>“Like something was wearing her,” Dean said, flicking his gaze back to the road.</p><p>Jenny nodded slowly. “Yeah, now that you say it, that’s exactly what it felt like.” She pulled her arms – still bound at the wrists – close against her ribs and squeezed as she replayed the memory in her head. “I thought of it more like ‘The Thing’ impersonating her, just really badly.”</p><p>Sam grimaced, turning to Dean. “And you saw Cas the same way?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said, gruffly. “It was wearing Cas like an oversized suit to the prom.”</p><p>“I didn’t start seeing her outside of my dreams until I got to Canton. And at first, I thought it really was Kate,” Jenny said. “It sounded exactly like her, and saying things only she would know. But everything about her was just … <em>wrong</em> somehow. The way she walked toward me was like … a puppet or something. All stiff and the joints didn’t bend like they were supposed to.”</p><p>Sam looked horrified. And concerned. And angry. <em>That’s never good. </em>Dean braced for impact as Sam turned his glare on him.</p><p>“And you didn’t think to tell me any of this?”</p><p>Dean shrugged. “I thought I was just seeing shit. Like after Purgatory.”</p><p>Sam’s shoulders fell as he quickly backed off the offensive. Losing Cas in Purgatory had sent Dean spiraling out to a caliber Sam hadn’t seen in a long time, if ever. Dean had been utterly consumed with grief and guilt.</p><p>Something seemed to click in Sam’s head. He whipped back around to face Jenny, who’d started staring blankly at the floor, like she was afraid of what she’d see if she let herself look out the Impala’s windows into the dark.</p><p>“Did anyone else see Kate? Did Luther?”</p><p>She shook her head. “No. Just me.”</p><p>“Why you?”</p><p>Jenny took a long breath, her lip trembling as she slowly raised her head to meet Sam’s eyes.</p><p>“Because I’m the one who killed her.”</p><p>“Dean, that’s it! That’s the connection between what you both saw,” Sam said almost excitedly as the pieces came together in his head faster than he could speak. “You both—“</p><p>Dean slammed on the brakes, the Impala’s tires screeching in protest. He winced as he lurched forward, squeezing the wheel in an odd sort of apology to Baby. The force of the sudden stop threw Jenny up against the back of the seat and she cried out in surprise.</p><p>They sat there in the middle of the road, idling.</p><p>“<em>I didn’t kill Cas!</em>” Dean yelled, punching his good hand against the driver’s door. “He… he <em>chose</em> it. To save me, Sam.” The words were acid on his tongue. “I get it, he’s dead because of <em>me.</em>”</p><p>“That’s,” Sam breathed. “That’s not what I was saying.”</p><p>Dean paused for a moment before turning to face him.</p><p>“It’s not about killing anyone,” Sam said. “It’s about guilt.”</p><p>Dean struggled to come up with a rebuttal, with any sort of bitter retort he could snap out as a defense, no matter how hollow. But he came up empty. For weeks, he could feel the weighted blanket of his guilt settling around him, muffling the outside world and trapping him with his thoughts. It coursed beneath every one of his actions, his consciousness constantly tapping into that dark vein of blame and self-loathing and hatred that wove around his bones.</p><p>“That actually makes sense,” Jenny said, rubbing her forehead from where she’d been thrown face first into the back of their seats. “I don’t feel guilty for offing her – that bitch had it coming – but when Luther started freaking out … when it started to tear apart my nest – my <em>family</em> … yeah. Guilt was probably the strongest thing I felt.”</p><p>“So whatever this thing is,” Sam explained. “It seems to feed off of guilt.”</p><p>Dean shut his eyes to stop himself from spinning out. When he spoke, it was flat and devoid of feeling, thanks to years of choking down fear and guilt and any other emotion his Dad had damn near beat out of him. <em>Focus on the hunt.</em> “So how do we stop it?”</p><p>Sam opened the glove compartment to rifle through the scattered sheets of lore they’d left in there from previous hunts, looking for anything that could help them. But he knew he’d come up empty. This was unlike anything they’d faced before.</p><p>“Can you remember anything else?” Sam didn’t direct the question at anyone in particular.</p><p>Dean and Jenny exchanged glances.</p><p>“It like … oozes,” she said. “Like oil. Right before it shows up you just see … black. And wet.” She scrunched up her face. “And the <em>smell</em>.”</p><p>Dean nodded slightly. “Rancid.” He nudged Sam with his elbow. “Remember when I dropped a piece of burger under the seat in here and we didn’t find it for <em>weeks</em>? Smells like that.”</p><p>Sam gave him an incredulous look. “You said that was <em>my</em> fault! I knew it, you jerk. I don’t even…” He broke off, setting his breath and letting it go.</p><p>Dean shrugged. Sam went back to his notes.</p><p>“Huh,” Sam puzzled over the sheets of paper and notebooks that were spilling out of the compartment. “That means it’s manifesting to multiple senses.” He chewed absently on the back of his pen, a habit that irked Dean, but now didn’t seem like the time to berate him about it. “Is it a physical presence, or like a ghost? Like, is it solid?”</p><p>“You think I’d get close enough to <em>touch</em> it?” Jenny recoiled. “Like <em>hell</em>—“</p><p>“It’s solid,” Dean interjected, cutting her off. “But when… man, I don’t know, I don’t think it likes being touched? When I…” he cleared his throat. “When I grabbed it, it had some kind of defense mechanism.”</p><p>“A defense mechanism?” Sam squinted.</p><p>Jenny turned to look out the window. She wanted this thing <em>gone</em> from her life. Dead. Not psychoanalyzed.</p><p>“Yeah, like uh…” Dean racked his brain for the name of it. “What was that plant Bobby always told us to stay away from when we were kids? The one that can make you blind?”</p><p>“Hogweed?”</p><p>“Yeah, it was like touching that,” Dean went on. “Huge blisters all up my arm. Hurt like a bitch.”</p><p>Jenny murmured something Dean didn’t quite hear.</p><p>Sam turned around in his seat. “What?”</p><p>“Static,” she said, her voice drifting like she was really a thousand miles away. “You’re forgetting the static.”</p><p>The slow, building static that masked itself in the background of the stereo, as the rising breeze rustling the final autumn leaves in the trees, within the folds of true silence. The static now muffled by the idling engine of the Impala until it was too late to run.</p><p>The static Dean just realized he could hear, right now.</p><p>He barely had time to swear under his breath as he fumbled for the gearshift, shoving his uninjured left hand awkwardly under the wheel to reach it. Something wet suddenly slapped against the back passenger window Jenny had been transfixed on. Two hands, loose skin pocked with blisters, pressed into the glass and smeared it with blackened pus.</p><p>“Boo!”</p><p>Jenny shrieked.</p><p>Dean’s hand closed around the gearshift and he yanked down hard, slamming the gas pedal to the floor. The Impala shuddered forward, the back end fishtailing out as the tires squealed against the pavement that was now slick with oil.</p><p>“Shit, shit shit,” Dean muttered, lifting his foot up and throwing Baby into reverse to see if they could gain traction that way.</p><p>“Dean?” Sam said, eyes wide with uncertainty. “It’s here isn’t it.”</p><p>Jenny just pointed forward out the windshield, her arms trembling. She was straining her wrists against the rope in panic. “T-that’s not k-Kate,” she stammered. “Who…?”</p><p>The Thing That Wasn’t Cas, But Also Was walked out of the shadows toward them in front of the Impala, though ‘walked’ was a loose description for how it was actually moving. Not-Cas lurched forward, its limbs stiff, hobbling forward one sideways-jutting knee and dragging the other behind it. It threw its shoulders too much into the movement, as though it were struggling to stay upright, as though the human body just didn’t quite have the dexterity it needed in a host. Not-Cas’s head lolled sideways at an angle that only made sense if its neck were broken.</p><p>And its mouth hung wide in a Glasgow grin.</p><p>The air around it fuzzed in tune with the static they heard. Not-Cas halted in the weak pools of light given off by the Impala’s headlights. The static grew louder, and louder, Jenny breaking her ties and clamping her hands over her ears and whimpering, Dean revving the Impala’s engine in panic. But it was no use, Baby wouldn’t move, her tires screeched in a futile spin in the thickening glaze that now churned like deep sludge onto the pavement. Smoke rose from her tires, and the smell of burning rubber mingled with the stench of the Thing’s putrid rot.</p><p>As Dean lifted his foot off the gas to give up, Not-Cas’s arm bent backwards at the elbow, and it raised its hand in a sickening, broken wave.</p><p>Dean stared in horror, unable to look away. Jenny just kept stammering her question over and over, still clamping her hands over her ears as though she didn’t really want to hear the answer. Sam squinted and ducked his head around, trying to figure out what they were seeing. All Sam saw was a dark hole, a shadow cut out of where the Impala’s headlights should be illuminating.</p><p>“Jenny,” Dean said, his voice low and calm. “Who do you see?”</p><p>“A-a man,” she was trying to get her voice under control. “A man in a trench coat. For Eve’s sake, did you kill an auditor?”</p><p>Dean steadied his breath. This wasn’t just in their heads. It wasn’t just a spectre pulling on the strings of their guilt and manifesting as their deepest betrayals. This was something <em>real</em>, something solid, something standing before them all as a distinct shape.</p><p>As Cas.</p><p>“Hello, Dean.” Cas’ stolen voice gurgled out of the Thing’s mouth, though its jagged and torn lips didn’t move. Its voice drifted through the cracks of the car, through the air vents and every crevice, making it sound like it was sitting right there in the backseat.</p><p>Sam suddenly froze, his body pressed rigid against the seat. His gaze was fixed on the stereo, where static was rising from the speakers. Dean punched the button to switch it off, but it was no use – it was never on to begin with. Dean glanced at Sam out of the corner of his eye, and <em>knew</em> that look. He could hear it, too.</p><p>“Where is it now?” Sam hissed. He still couldn’t see it. The voice seemed to come from all directions.</p><p>Dean didn’t get a chance to even shoot Sam a look that would shut him up. The Thing snapped its head around to stare directly at Sam – with the gaping, weeping holes in its face that should’ve been eyes – the disjointed and splintered bones of its neck cracking with the sheer force of the movement.</p><p>The Thing’s grin grew even wider when it saw – or rather, sensed – Sam, for it had no eyes. <em>Only wounds to weep from.</em></p><p>“Oh?” Not-Cas’s voice dripped with delight, crackling through the stereo. “How curious.”</p><p>It paused, considering Sam for a moment that stretched on for an eternity.</p><p>“There are a thousand forms of those you’ve lost,” Not-Cas said. “But there is not a single one you feel deeply enough to see. Old wounds, only, too scarred for me,” it hummed, almost whimsically. “How monstrous of you.”</p><p>Sam swallowed, glancing around nervously. Dean’s horror at the grotesque thing in front of him, masquerading as Cas and tormenting Sam, began to fuel a deeply rooted rage in the pit of his stomach.</p><p>“Ah, I see,” the Thing leaned forward to peer at Sam. Black pus dribbled out of the edge of its mouth and nose, and leaked from the empty sockets where Cas’ eyes should’ve been. It raised its blistered, bleeding hand to point at Dean. “The crux of your guilt is still alive.”</p><p>“What are you,” Dean snarled.</p><p>It laughed, a humorless, hollow, chilling noise like bones rattling in a tinderbox, a noise that should never come out of a human body. Then, suddenly, its explanation came not as words, but as a knowing in their minds.</p><p>I am the God of a thousand in-betweens, of the static in both silence and sound, of the decay when things have yet to die but cannot keep on living, of pus burning under your skin just before blisters form, of the brief blind moment when your eyes have yet to adjust to the dark. But most of all, I am the God of what festers in the wounds of betrayal, between unspoken truths and unwavering guilt.</p><p>“I don’t care what you’re the God of,” Dean raised his injured hand to grip the wheel in rage, ignoring the pain that seared up his arm. “Get. Out. Of. Cas.”</p><p>The Thing laughed, oil bubbling out of its mouth, spilling down its chin and staining its white collared shirt with black bile.</p><p>“Dean,” Sam said, his voice low and soft. “That’s not—“</p><p>“No,” Dean said. “Cas is in there. I <em>saw</em> him. I saw his eyes.”</p><p>Not-Cas didn’t seem to hear them over its hysterics. The laugh sounded like Cas at the surface, but was also somehow <em>wrong</em>, like how a fox screaming in the woods both seems wildly feral and hauntingly human.</p><p>Its laugh broke off as suddenly as it began.</p><p>“I’m not ‘in Cas,” It sneered. “I <em>own</em> him.”</p><p>Realization dawned on Sam’s face.</p><p>“The Empty,” Sam breathed.</p><p>“A crude name for my vastness,” It said, tilting its head piteously in Sam’s direction. “But I wouldn’t expect such simple creatures to be able to fully comprehend what I am. So that’ll have to do.”</p><p>“I swear to God,” Dean threatened, but the Empty didn’t let him finish.</p><p>“God? None of your so-called Gods have any power over me,” the Empty spat. “Your God is merely celestial. I am endless. I am <em>cosmic</em>.”</p><p>Dean floored it. And this time, Baby’s tires found purchase. The car tore forward, ramming into Not-Cas with enough force to shatter its spine. Dean heard the crunching and snapping of bones as The Empty buckled forward over the hood, its fingers smearing dark pus across the Impala’s glossy finish.</p><p>Dean clenched his jaw and shut his eyes as the Impala scraped over the body. They could feel the steel undercarriage cutting over every excruciating inch of Cas’s body until finally, the Impala broke free, and it was just pavement under her tires once again.</p><p>“Back up!” Jenny screeched. “Hit it again!”</p><p>“No,” Sam said, quietly. “That won’t stop it.”</p><p>Dean kept his foot firmly on the gas, and as they sped away, he could see Not-Cas in the rearview folding up into a stand, shattered gristle and sinew stuttering and snapping and grinding back into place. It lifted its hand again into that sickening backward wave. The entire time, it never stopped grinning.</p><p>Dean snatched his eyes away from the mirror and back onto the dark road.</p><p>“Be glad you couldn’t see that,” Dean said numbly. He was still struggling to process the atrocity he’d just witnessed. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to. He’d seen a lot of messed up shit as a hunter, but that … <em>fuck </em>the pie festival. Fuck Ohio. After this, he never wanted to step foot anywhere near this goddamn state ever again.</p><p>“What did it mean, ‘the crux of my guilt is still alive?’” Sam mused. “It can only manifest as the dead?”</p><p>Dean shrugged.</p><p>“The dead we feel guilty over,” Jenny said, finally pulling her hands away from her face. “It got so bad, I left Luther and the others. Thought that’d fix it. I ran halfway across the country, but when I made it to West Virginia, I started seeing her in my dreams again.”</p><p>“You don’t feel guilty for <em>any</em> of them?” Dean snapped, ignoring Jenny. “Not Charlie, not mom, not Kevin, not even Jess?”</p><p>“None of their deaths were my fault!” Sam shouted.</p><p>Dean snorted. “Right. We didn’t save them, like <em>that’s</em> not on us.”</p><p>“We <em>tried</em>, Dean! You can’t save everyone.”</p><p>“Everyone,” Dean’s breath shook with anger and grief. “Who comes near us. <em>Dies</em>. And you don’t think we’re at fault? There’s a goddamn <em>vampire</em> in the backseat who feels more guilt than you do, Sam! A <em>monster</em>.”</p><p>Sam punched the dash in fury. And again. And again. Dean knew if he weren’t driving, it may have been his face beneath Sam’s fist. <em>No, Dad’s fist, </em>his mind corrected.<em> Sam would never.</em></p><p>But the blood and dents Sam’s anger left behind in the Impala’s dash ached in his chest by proxy. A damage to their home, to their past, to their hearts.</p><p>And Dean’s rage reveled in the hurt he was inflicting on Sam, because it ricocheted right back at himself tenfold.</p><p>Jenny shot forward and dug her nails into the back of both of their necks, baring her fangs in a feral hiss that stopped them both cold.</p><p>“Shut <em>up</em>,” she snarled. “Shut up, both of you. I can’t believe you’re the ones monsters literally tell stories about to scare their young. If only they knew what dysfunctional dipshits you are.”</p><p>Sam looked down at his bloodied fist, now matching with Dean’s mangled hand. Dean just narrowed his eyes at Jenny in the mirror as a challenge.</p><p>“Now, <em>listen</em>.” She shoved her hands away from their necks and slumped back in her seat. “We need to go back to the barn.”</p><p>“What?” Dean said. “Why?”</p><p>“I think that’s like its home base. It’s the strongest I’ve ever felt it there. Even just now, it should’ve killed all three of us. But it didn’t. I don’t think it was strong enough to get inside the car. To get inside your head again.”</p><p>“Hm,” Sam mumbled, massaging his sore hand while he considered it. “What’s so special about the barn?”</p><p>“I don’t know exactly,” Jenny said. “But in all of my dreams, it seemed to lure me to Ohio. Specifically to that barn. Like it wanted me there. I think it can only show itself in person near here for some reason.”</p><p>She paused, but neither of the brothers chimed in. The tension hung thick in the air.</p><p>Jenny continued. “That nest I joined here … we were trying to stop it.”</p><p>“What, you and the Pennywise gang?” Dean scoffed. “How?”</p><p>“They’d done it before. Every few years now for decades. Our alpha told me he summoned it way back then. By accident.”</p><p>“How do you summon a Lovecraftian entity on accident,” Dean said, more of an accusation than a question.</p><p>“No, wait,” Sam said, rifling through the papers he’d pulled out of the dash. Among those were some more recent notes he’d taken when Cas had first told them about the Empty. “There is a way to summon it. Cas never told us how, but—“</p><p>“Look, I don’t know how it started, and I never <em>want</em> to,” she spat. “All I know is, all of us in that nest were tormented by it. We were all lured here by it, and it wouldn’t stop until we gave it a sacrifice.”</p><p>“Those kids?” Dean asked, shutting his eyes for a moment. The words stung bitter on his tongue. His job was about saving people, and that meant everyone – and while he wasn’t a father, there was something about monsters who hurt kids that made him so angry his teeth ached.</p><p>“Usually,” Jenny said, hesitantly. Dean felt anger coiling his hand into a fist again. He gripped the wheel tighter and slowed the car, looking for the turn off the road up to the barn. “Look, I—kids are off-menu, alright? Feeding on adults is one thing. But this…” She trailed off. “You’ve felt it. That kind of fear makes you desperate. It takes advantage of that.”</p><p>“But then we showed up, ruined your little Eldritch picnic,” Dean growled.</p><p>“Mm. Maybe,” she mused. “Normally we stalk a family, find one with just one kid. Minimal damage. We only <em>need</em> one parent for the ritual, so we feed on the other. One for ‘it,’ one for us.” Jenny spoke calmly. She’d detached herself so far from it, her voice sounded like she was just reading off a shopping list. “We’d bring the parent and the kid out here, and the Empty or whatever you call it would sortof … puppet the adult. Like it did with you.”</p><p>She nodded at Dean, who just set a cold glare on the road ahead, refusing to look at her. He <em>did</em> know what it felt like to have it torment and control him, to force him to (nearly) take the life of someone he loved. His anger at Jenny drained away. The tension receded from his shoulders and loosened his grip on the wheel. Jenny was a killer on paper, sure, but by some shallow definitions, so was Dean. They were both forced into this life by blood, yet shuffled into different categories by the whims of coincidence and circumstance.</p><p>And it was his fault she became a vampire in the first place, after all.</p><p>“The masks stopped it from jumping into one of us,” she continued. “Then… it would make them murder their own kid.” She shuddered. “They’re just conscious enough to know what they’re doing, but they can’t stop it. I never knew why it liked to do it that way, but if it fed off of <em>guilt</em> as a sacrifice, not blood, that would be a hell of a feeding.”</p><p>There was silence in the car for a long moment.</p><p>“What changed?” Sam finally asked.</p><p>“It surprised us. Popped up a <em>lot</em> sooner than anyone here expected, right after the blip when everyone vanished and then sorta came back?” Jenny said, uncertainty tipping the edges of her voice. Sam and Dean exchanged a glance.</p><p>“We last put it back to sleep a little over a year ago,” she went on. “We were supposed to have more time, but we didn’t. I started seeing Kate again, the others saw their own demons, and we panicked. Accidentally picked a family with two kids. The mom got away and we snatched the two kids instead, thinking that would work. But it didn’t.”</p><p>She paused, considering something. “Maybe it’s because we didn’t cut out one of their tongues? But I just. Eve, I couldn’t do that. Not to a kid.”</p><p>“Is that part of the ritual?” Sam asked, scribbling down notes as Jenny spoke.</p><p>“The most important part is cutting out the parent’s tongue,” she nodded. “It has a thing about silence.”</p><p>They were getting closer to the barn. Dean could feel it. A sort of dark, displaced fury began to bubble up in his chest. It was an anger that didn’t quite feel like his own, but it was one he channeled into a pure hatred for the Empty. For tearing apart families and feasting on the corpse of despair. For mutilating love until only guilt remained.</p><p>Dean gripped the wheel so tight he thought it might crumble into dust beneath his palms.</p><p>Sam looked at him warily. “Hang on, Dean,” Sam said, keeping his voice steady as to not provoke him. “Didn’t Cas wake it up and really piss it off?”</p><p>
  <em>Oh. Yeah, he did. </em>
</p><p>“And when I ran into it in Billie’s library, all it talked about was wanting to go back to sleep,” Dean said, a realization dawning on him. “Maybe this isn’t about feeding at all. Maybe it’s revenge.”</p><p>“That tracks,” Sam hummed in agreement. “Or maybe,” he shot a hopeful glance at Dean, “maybe it still can’t sleep. Maybe Cas is still fighting. Maybe he’s awake.”</p><p>That shot Dean into high gear.</p><p>“Then we have to pull him out,” Dean said, feeling the most alive he’d had in months. Years, maybe. The anger and self-doubt in his veins was overrun as his heart began to beat pure determination and resolve. He coaxed the Impala onto the sunken, long-neglected road toward the barn. “And we’re gonna make this son of a bitch think it’s got home field advantage.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>My interpretation of the Empty is rooted in an unsettling memory of a time I got lost, alone, in the middle of the night trying to find the highway, and accidentally stumbled upon an abandoned barn left to rot in the backwoods of Florida. It was overgrown with vines and just had "moss man" sprayed across the rotting wood in red paint. It was nighttime, but the expanse of darkness inside that barn was a gaping, haunting empty I'd never witnessed before. I high-tailed it out of there, and when I'd finally made it to the roadside motel I was crashing in for the night, something sinister lurked in my dreams. I've never been able to find the barn again. I'm not sure I want to. Anyway, next chapter will be up soon!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>before you read this chapter, please just remember that -- without me spoiling anything -- this was tagged as having a happy ending. i didn't lie. that hasn't changed.<br/>but this is supernatural -- we gotta go through a little anguish to get there.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was here.</p><p>Dean could <em>feel</em> it. The heaviness of the Empty pulsed from within every rusted nail inside the barn, and every eye burnt into the wooden beams turned its petrified glare upon him. He could sense it whispering beneath his footsteps in the dust, slipping through the spaces of his exhales, winding and writhing into his thoughts with every aching breath.</p><p>Its sheer presence hiked an anxiety up Dean’s spine. It was akin to the memory of stumbling drunk and alone and vulnerable in an empty bar’s parking lot long after closing time, and hearing the sound of an approaching car slowly sliding stopping behind him – but he’d turn to see the street is dark and empty, stretching into nothing.</p><p>He heard the slow, climbing cacophonous static rising between the gnarled trees, growing louder and louder like someone had cranked a dead signal up to 10 – and this time, he knew it wasn’t the wind.</p><p>He was listening, keening to dial into the Empty’s frequency. To welcome it back in. To put it down, for everything it had stolen from him, from Cas.</p><p>The Empty seemed to be coming after him for revenge, not realizing the very same motivation now coursed through Dean’s blood. If he could do one thing worthwhile in his life, he thought, it’d be flipping the script.</p><p>He was ready to attack the Empty like it was the last moment he’d ever get.</p><p>Well, almost. Dean swayed, unsteady and woozy on his feet. In this moment, his resolve was stronger than his body.</p><p>Sam hadn’t liked this plan at all. Too risky, he’d said. <em>Sweet, optimistic Sammy. Always determined to find another way.</em> But they were running out of time. The night would bleed into dawn soon – the sky was already starting to lighten into charcoal. They’d have to work fast.</p><p>“I’ll be fine,” Dean had promised, though he only half-believed it himself. He finally had a purpose again – and he knew if this didn’t work, that it was over: over for him, over for Cas. There was no other way, and he couldn’t keep on like this. Dean knew that for certain; losing this battle would break him. It was a surety set deep in the marrow of his bones.</p><p>And so he had fallen to his knees, stuck out his arm and let Jenny bleed him to the brink of unconsciousness.</p><p>Sam pointedly looked up and away. Even all these years later, something about seeing blood-drinking still snapped against a painful old wound in his mind.</p><p>It only took a few minutes. Vampires work fast. There was a low, nagging fear in the back of Dean’s mind that Jenny wouldn’t stop, that she’d just bleed him dry right then and there. But where he lacked trust for this monster – this thing that defied his often black-and-white worldview with her claws and her sympathy – there was a trust in the circumstance. It was a temporary alliance forged in a shared fear and loathing for the same thing that haunted them, and was preying on kids.</p><p>Jenny sat back and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, smearing Dean’s blood across her tattered jacket. Dean flexed his fingers, which had gone numb and prickled with the lack of circulation.</p><p>She smirked, her fangs slowly retracting back up into her gums. “Never thought I’d say this to a Winchester,” Jenny said, a hint of fondness edging into her voice. “But I’d better see you two again someday.”</p><p>“You will,” Sam said, leveling a hardened stare at her. “Count on it. We’ll come after you.”</p><p>“Hey, hey, c’mere,” Dean said, reaching up with a hand he could barely feel and gesturing for Jenny to lean closer. The blood loss made him feel bolder and a little drunk. He clasped his hand around her forearm, and his words came out slow and slurred. “When we hunt your ass and gank you, you find Benny and you say Dean sent ya,” he winked.</p><p>“Okay?” She laughed, a little unsure. “I’ll try.”</p><p>“And…” Dean mumbled. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you back then.”</p><p>Jenny smiled, the first genuine smile he’d ever seen from her. “It’s okay,” she said, sliding her arm up out of Dean’s grip so she could grasp his hand. She squeezed it gently. “You’re saving me now.”</p><p>She let go of his hand, and the next thing Dean knew, Jenny was gone. He’d looked away only for a moment, and felt a soft brush of air as she bolted out of that barn despite her wounded knee. Her sudden exit carried a familiarity with it that panged in Dean’s heart.</p><p>“Dean, I—“ Sam started. But Dean cut him off with a wave of his hand.</p><p>“Don’t,” he said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath to ground himself. “We’re gonna end this. And then you’re gonna get me that pie you promised, alright?”</p><p>“Okay,” Sam swallowed, shifting his weight nervously. He shook the small syringe they’d scrounged up out of a half-forgotten bag in Baby’s trunk, sloshing the meager amount of liquid around inside. It had been nestled in between the last few drops of holy oil and a congealed brew from fermented African Dream Root (or, root beer as Dean had once jokingly called it before taking a swig). It was in the Bag of Last Resorts, though neither of them would acknowledge that out loud. “Hopefully this is enough now.”</p><p>Dean didn’t so much nod as he did bob his whole head up and down in agreement. The barn was swaying in his vision like a ship on the ocean. He shut his eyes to stave off the vertigo that came with losing so much blood. In this weakened state, it should be safe to let the Empty back in without it being able to make him dangerous. Hopefully. <em>Maybe.</em></p><p>“You ready?” Sam broached the question reluctantly.</p><p>Dean coughed a laugh. “Let’s give ‘em hell.”</p><p>He shut his eyes and leaned forward from where he knelt on the floor of that long-abandoned barn. Dean pressed his palms into the dust, splaying the fingers of his injured hand out wide and gritting his teeth through the pain.</p><p>The barn was cold, and desolate, and dark. The shadows here were clouded with memories of violence and exploitation; the atrocities committed so powerful they became embossed in time itself. He could hear distant screams echoing through decades of stillness, could just barely catch the scent of fear, of steel, of coal dust and blood. He could feel a presence, the master of this rusted domain, snagging at the edges of his perception, testing the bait of his thoughts.</p><p>Dean took a shuddering, labored breath. And he opened the floodgates.</p><p>Dean plunged his arms into the swirling, murky depths of his most damaging thoughts and let wave after wave of guilt crash over him until it dragged him under. He was hit by a fear of disappointing a father figure he no longer respected, struck by every time he’d let Sam get hurt, tumbled through the undertow of losing Cas over and over, every time more and more his fault. A riptide of a thousand hands of those he’d failed – failed to help, failed to make proud, failed to save – grappled at his legs, his arms, his throat, their nails piercing his skin like fishhooks until one finally clasped over his mouth.</p><p>Dean fought to breathe, fought to scream, to yell, to curse, to bite – but the hand sealed his mouth shut and locked his voice away. Dean was silenced.</p><p><em>Shhh.</em> A mockery of a soothing noise, the voice that cooed in his ear was drenched with venom.</p><p>Dean could feel the sting of a tear at the back of his eyes as he was dragged down into his own darkness. His lungs burned, screaming for air. He scrabbled at the hand on his mouth, sinking his nails into the flesh and –</p><p>He felt blood dripping down the back of his hand. <em>His</em> hand. Dean froze.</p><p>The hand pressed against his mouth was his own.</p><p>“You know,” the stolen voice of Cas drifted out from somewhere behind him. Dean spun around on his knees, eyes searching. But there was only darkness.</p><p>“I was here before everything.”</p><p>It was still coming from behind him. Dean scrambled around to try and find the source, find where it was standing. But everything around him was empty.</p><p>“Before your puny God and all of his noisy creations. And in all of my eons of existence, all that time enduring the horrible cacophony you call <em>life,</em>” it spat, “none of it has been so irritating as <em>you</em>.”</p><p>Dean tried to snarl at it, but his hand was still welded to his lips, rendering him voiceless.</p><p>“And yet,” The Empty mused. The voice was now coming from the dark space in front of him. “None of it has been as facile as you.”</p><p>Cas’s stolen body lurched forward suddenly out of the inky black. Only this time, on the Thing’s own turf, its pilfered vessel seemed to better contain its viscous, putrid true form. Cas’s skin no longer hung loose off of his bones, his hands weren’t dappled with painful, oozing blisters, oil no longer seeped from every pore.</p><p>The Empty looked startlingly like Cas, which only twisted the knife deeper into Dean’s chest. There was only one, grounding, gruesome difference: where Cas’s brilliant soulful blue eyes should’ve been was nothing but empty sockets.</p><p>“The Old Death once promised me your soul,” It said, its voice hollow and cold. “Promised to banish you to the void so you could never resurrect. But <em>souls</em> are restless. <em>Souls </em>don’t sleep. And now <em>I</em> can’t sleep.” An unhinged hint of wrath began to climb in its throat.</p><p>“And that … <em>seraph</em>,” the word sounded like acid on its tongue, “is gripping to the headstone Billie left for you like an insolent little insect yearning for a flame.” Its voice dropped low, threatening. “I didn’t come here to feed. I came here to break you. To crush your soul into the stardust it came from and scatter it into nothing.</p><p>“Yet, I did not have to do anything. <em>You</em> brought me here. <em>You</em> carried out my ritual.” The Empty leaned forward with a toothy sneer, the dark of its eye sockets seeming to stare straight through Dean. “Curious. No tongue-cutting required.”</p><p>The Empty laid its thumb under Dean’s chin and tilted his head up, forcing Dean to look at it. He felt the burning of blisters blooming beneath his jaw. Dean narrowed his eyes, a tear streaming down his cheek, propelled both by fury and the fire in his lungs.</p><p>“You’re already silenced. You silence yourself every day.” It grinned impossibly, unsettlingly wide and tilted its head in a gesture as stolen as the body it wore. “Tell me, what is it the mirror makes you loathe so much?”</p><p>Dean couldn’t answer.</p><p>Not-Cas tipped its head back in laughter. It already knew the answer. It had taunted Dean once in a dream, dangling the truth of it just out of reach. <em>I know your secret,</em> it had slurred as a threat.</p><p>Rage rose hot beneath Dean’s skin. He leveled a glare at this monster, this thing that was desecrating Cas’s body and memory, this thing that had stolen Cas’s life and soul, this thing that had weaponized Cas’s love. <em>No. Had weaponized </em>my—</p><p>It was a thought he’d normally choke down. But here, at the edge of it all, his pain laid bare, the truth bubbled up in his chest not with guilt – but with power.</p><p><em>Had weaponized </em>my <em>love.</em></p><p>He wouldn’t be silenced anymore. Dean’s hand loosened and fell from his lips, followed by a breathy “<em>fuck </em>you.”</p><p>“You,” Dean gasped, “know <em>nothing</em>.”</p><p>The Empty’s demeanor inverted on a dime as it felt its grip loosening on Dean’s mind. The jovial mockery in its posture and tone snapped into a sinister rage, its sneer melting into a snarl. It was a sudden shift in temper Dean knew all too well from growing up on the wrong side of John’s fist. The Empty sprang forward, sinking its fingertips into Dean’s temples, burrowing down with its jagged nails.</p><p>“You are broken,” it hissed from behind Cas’s face, the voice now coming from inside Dean’s mind as the Empty wrestled for control of his thoughts. “<em>You</em> are nothing.”</p><p>Dean curled his injured hand into a fist, sinking his own nails into the wound, and could feel the Empty hiss and recoil, just for a second. <em>Thought so</em>, <em>you didn’t like that pain the last time you were in me, you bastard. </em></p><p>Thorny tendrils of vengeful darkness curled around Dean’s wrists and ankles and sides, pressing deep blistering cuts into his skin. Dean could feel the sores opening on every inch of flesh as the Empty gnashed and ripped and tore into him. The pain was blinding, but Dean was laughing.</p><p>Laughing because he’d <em>won</em>. Because he was free. <em>Enjoy the ride, asshole.</em></p><p>“Sam!” He shouted. “Now!”</p><p>He couldn’t see Sam – the barn had fuzzed out of his vision as the Empty’s poisonous ooze seared into his corneas.</p><p>But he knew Sam was there the moment he felt the long needle of that syringe bury itself into his chest. Sam pressed down hard on the plunger, shooting the last few drops of serum straight into his heart.</p><p>Dean sucked in an instinctive, stuttering breath, and fell to the ground, dead.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong><span class="u">Part Three</span>: What Comes After</strong>
</p><p>It was an endless, torturous cycle.</p><p>His bones – the ones he didn’t even know if he still had – ached with weariness. He didn’t know how many times he had drifted into consciousness, slowly regaining awareness of who he was and where, only to collide with the most beautiful glowing light he’d ever seen.</p><p>The beauty of it was enrapturing. But before he could learn to speak again, to call out to it, to hold it close, it was wrenched from his grasp by a swarm of a thousand thorny hooks and he was drowned by darkness once more.</p><p>Castiel knew this wasn’t the first time he’d endured this cycle – one of confusion, then awe, then desperation and unfathomable pain and loss – and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. There would never be a “last,” this cycle was as horrific as it was eternal.</p><p>And yet, his spirit could not be broken at the gnarled hands of the entity that ruled this realm. Castiel fell shattered for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, incalculable against the void of both this world and his vacillating memory.</p><p>But falling meant getting to be graced once again by that beautiful soul, getting to lay eyes on it for the first time, over and over. Castiel knew every time the Empty pulled him beneath the surface into the murky depths of regret, shushing him to sleep and <em>stay asleep</em>, that the pull of that soul still burning bright would awaken him once more.</p><p>This cycle was not by design. This was not how it was supposed to be. Nothing was supposed to exist in this expanse. Nothing that resembled life, at least. It was simply meant to be a cosmic stasis – where the corpses of a million slain celestials and their underworldly counterparts would quietly decay, replaying their deepest regrets while sinking back into the ether and being consumed by the empty itself.</p><p>But this, here, was something that transcended the Empty’s control.</p><p>Castiel drifted toward the soul, arm outstretched, a small smile and a single name on his lips. Except –</p><p>He faltered. This … didn’t seem right.</p><p>The soul began to flicker far more than usual, its light wavering, struggling against the encroaching dark.</p><p>“No,” Castiel stretched his arm out further, desperate, straining to reach it before – before – “<em>No!</em>”</p><p>The soul’s light flared like one last, stuttering breath, one last act of defiance, before being extinguished along with the exhale.</p><p>The cycle shattered, and with it, Castiel.</p><p>The light was out. The soul was <em>gone</em>. And Castiel’s hand fell through empty air as he was plunged into what he knew now would be an endless darkness.</p>
<hr/><p><em>Thump</em>.</p><p>Dean’s chest heaved with the noise. <em>Something’s at the door</em>, his disjointed thoughts offered as they scrambled to make sense of the world around him. That was odd, he wondered. He wasn’t expecting anyone.</p><p>
  <em>Thump.</em>
</p><p>Annoyance trickled into his senses. Whoever it was, they were slamming the door so hard it sent a jolt through his body. <em>Sam will get it</em>. He wanted to go back to sleep.</p><p><em>Thump</em>.</p><p>Fine. <em>He’d</em> get it. Dean was ready to open his eyes, to sit up and yell at whoever wasn’t letting him sleep, except—he couldn’t. Dean couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe. He was paralyzed where he lay bruised on that dusty, goddamn barn floor.</p><p>“Dean, <em>come on</em>,” Sam said, voice strained. “<em>Please</em>.”</p><p>Dean felt electricity bolt into his chest, felt it race through his veins, only to fizzle out. It wasn’t catching. A resigned sense of calm seeped in where, in another time, there would’ve been panic.</p><p>Suddenly, Dean wasn’t lying on the floor anymore.</p><p>Well. Mostly.</p><p>He stood, sullen, staring down at where his body sprawled in the dust. Sam’s face was streaked with tears, his hands shaking as he pressed the defibrillator’s paddles to Dean’s chest once more, his hope fading with each failed shock.</p><p>Dean knew this was a possibility. That the plan to banish the Empty by drawing it completely into himself and dying to slingshot it away from the mortal plane was reckless; made even more so by the fact they didn’t have enough serum left to stop his heart on its own. Jenny had to weaken him for it to work. But it worked a little too well.</p><p>He knew he wasn’t coming back.</p><p>“I told you this was a stupid plan, you stubborn—“ <em>Thump. </em>“self-destructive—“ <em>Thump.</em> “Jerk!”</p><p>Dean winced and looked away as Sam charged the paddles and pleaded with his corpse.</p><p>“Just…” The words shook on Sam’s breath. “Come back.”</p><p>
  <em>Thump.</em>
</p><p>“Sam. It’s okay,” he murmured, though he knew Sam couldn’t hear him. He was behind the veil now, one foot between future vengeful spirit and the other toward whatever waited for him beyond this. Hell<em>, </em>he was pretty sure.</p><p>“Dean, <em>please</em>,” Sam choked out, finally dropping the paddles. He fell back from where he had been crouching over Dean’s body, drawing his knees in and burying his face in his hands. “You can’t— you can’t leave me.”</p><p>Dean fell to his knees next to his brother. The motion felt unreal – there was no sound in it, no air, nothing to disturb the thick layer of grime beneath him. “Sammy,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You knew it was always gonna end like this for me.”</p><p>The words felt wrong in his mouth – it was an old ending he’d convinced himself was written for him long ago. Somehow, despite how much he yearned to escape the brutality of this life he was forced to live, telling himself he knew how he was going to die was comforting. It felt like he could control at least one thing.</p><p>But after everything, some small part of him had dreamt of apple pie and domesticity, and hoped it wasn’t true.</p><p>Oh, how wrong his hope had been. His hope that somehow, things had changed. That he was capable of something else. Maybe he would’ve been, had he acted sooner. Had he pulled his head out of his ass, tore through the seams of his repressed feelings and just <em>loved</em>. Maybe some of this pain, this loss – for both him and now Sam – could’ve been avoided.</p><p>He’d sown a path paved with the stones of self-loathing, and dragged Cas and Sam down with him. And he was too fucked up to even notice. <em>Just like Dad.</em></p><p>Dean had failed. Had failed to save Cas, had failed to protect Sam.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Dean whispered.</p><p>Sam, of course, didn’t react. He just tangled his fingers in the hair at his temples and curled in on himself.</p><p>Deep down, Dean hoped his reaper would guide him to the Empty like Billie had promised. After what he’d done – his inaction and avoidance leading to Cas’ sacrifice, and now his own self-destructive grief leading to Sam’s pain – he figured he deserved an eternity of torture at the claws of the entity he’d just royally pissed off.</p><p>At least Cas was there. They’d be unconscious, forever apart, but at least they’d be in the same realm once more.</p><p>A few painful moments stretched far longer than they should have, with Sam’s jagged breaths the only thing to break the stillness.</p><p>“I can’t…” Sam dragged in a breath. “I can’t do this without you.”</p><p>“Yes,” Dean said, his own voice wavering now. "You can."</p><p>“I can’t do this alone.”</p><p>If Dean were alive, he would’ve grabbed Sam’s arms and shaken him. Instead, he poured every ounce of energy he had into his words, hoping that some shred of them made it through the veil.</p><p>“You’re not alone,” Dean stressed. “You have Jody and the girls, you have other universe Bobby and Charlie and all of those hunters <em>you</em> saved. They’re alive because of us. Because of <em>you</em>.”</p><p>Sam just pressed his hands against his face.</p><p>“You have Eileen, Sam,” Dean said. “You have the chance to really live. With someone who gets it, who gets the life. You have someone to live <em>for.</em> Don’t,” he choked on the word. “Don’t throw that away like I did... with Cas.” He felt some relief as the truth tumbled out of him. There were no secrets in death.</p><p>He knelt there next to Sam, knowing his final moments with his brother were quickly ticking away. Waiting for his reaper felt both excruciatingly slow (<em>busy night</em>?) and far too fleeting.</p><p>Something wooden dragged across the ground behind him. Slow and steady, he could hear soft footfalls accompanied by the gentle scrape of a long, heavy scythe along the stone floor.</p><p>Dean smiled and huffed a breathy laugh despite himself. He didn’t look up. <em>Of course</em>. Death themself had come for him. He should’ve expected that. He was VIP after all. A bitter honor, but one he’d graciously accept.</p><p>What he didn’t expect was to hear Death heave a gruff, gravelly sigh.</p><p>“<em>Balls</em>.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>come yell at me on tumblr! @withclawsandsympathy</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You sure don’t waste any time,” Death grumbled. “You got dam idjit.”</p><p>Dean whirled around as he rose to his feet. “Bobby?”</p><p>“The one an’ only.” He paused, feigning annoyance. “Well. In the afterlife, anyway.”</p><p>“Yeah, uh—“ Dean started.</p><p>Bobby waved a hand dismissively. “S’fine. Thanks for rescuin’ other me outta Apocalypse World. I’m just glad you stopped at there bein’ two of me. That’s more’n enough.”</p><p>Dean couldn’t help the soft, reluctant smile that pulled at the corner of his mouth. Bobby looked just as he always did – clad in old flannel and a fishing vest, his face framed by a scruffy beard, and that old trucker’s hat Dean swore was older than he was perched on his head. The only difference now, was the long scythe Bobby leaned on like he’d always had it, like it was a part of himself, and Death’s large white ring around his finger.</p><p>Bobby’s ring now, he supposed.</p><p>“What’s with the getup?” Dean asked, gesturing to the scythe.</p><p>“What’s with you dyin’ after what, two weeks of freedom?” Bobby shot back.</p><p>Dean flinched, palming the back of his neck in discomfort. Yeah, he deserved that. He glanced over his shoulder at Sam, who’d seemed to start to collect himself. Dean felt that shift in Sam – that shift of him beginning to accept what had just happened, to pick himself back up, to keep surviving despite it all – and his heart panged with it.</p><p>He hadn’t let the kid say goodbye.</p><p>Bobby sighed, dropping his shoulders with the weight of his exhale.</p><p>“C’mon, son,” Bobby said, his tone shifting to a more resigned disappointment. “It’s time.”</p><p>“I, uh.” Dean cleared his throat, pressing a sob back down into his chest before it could rip free. “I didn’t get to say goodbye.”</p><p>“Most people don’t,” Bobby shrugged. “Especially not in your line of work.”</p><p>Dean just stared down at his body, numb.</p><p>“Here,” Bobby said.</p><p>Dean tore his gaze away and turned, now staring dumbfounded at what was in Bobby’s hand. A piece of crumpled receipt paper, and a cheap ballpoint pen that looked like it was on its last legs. “What?”</p><p>“It’s a pen, boy. You write with it.”</p><p>Dean just blinked.</p><p>“I’m lettin’ you say goodbye,” he said, as Dean slowly took the pen and paper out of his hand. “Make it count.”</p><p>The paper was too small to write everything he wanted to tell Sam, if he could even put it all into words. For a man who’d always thought he’d die tomorrow, he never thought to prepare a speech for when the moment finally came. It was probably for the best, anyway. He was never the manifesto type.</p><p>But he managed to scrawl a few short sentences before the ink ran dry.</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p><em>I’m so proud of you, Sammy. Always will be. Keep fighting the good fight.<br/></em> <em>Take care of Miracle for me.<br/></em> <em>And if you put a damn ipod in Baby, so help me, I’ll haunt your ass.</em></p>
</blockquote><p>He paused for a moment, scribbling the pen in the corner to draw out the last few drops of ink.</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>Tell Eileen you love her already. Don’t fuck it up like I did.</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>The pen ran out on the last word, and Dean knew his time was up. He folded up the note and tucked it into Sam’s jacket pocket just as his brother stood and lifted Dean’s dead body into his arms.</p><p>Dean watched as Sam padded out of the barn, Dean’s body swaying limp in his grasp, and stepped into the dim early morning light. Stepped into a dawn of uncertainty. Into the dawn of a life without Dean.</p><p>“I love you,” Dean murmured after him.</p><p>And with that, Sam was gone.</p><p>Bobby stepped forward and placed a comforting hand on Dean’s shoulder.</p><p>“C’mon, boy,” he said. “You look like you could use a drink.”</p><hr/><p>Dean leaned back in the patio chair, letting a slow and languid stretch roll through his body. He couldn’t remember the last time he stretched his legs out without feeling his knees pop or his muscles burn. He’d been battered and bruised by the hunt long before the aches of age could settle in to his joints.</p><p>The sun felt warm on his face, and he closed his eyes and savored a deep breath of sweet summertime air. There was a peace here, but a fleeting one. An undeserved one. How could he rest when there was so much unfinished, so much unsaid?</p><p>He watched Bobby lean the scythe up against the outside of Harvelle’s Roadhouse with an uncharacteristic quiet.</p><p>“I don’t remember this,” Dean said, his voice coming out softer than he’d intended. <em>It’s … too peaceful.</em></p><p>“You shouldn’t,” Bobby said with a grunt, collapsing into the chair next to Dean. He rummaged around in the cooler between them as Dean shot him a quizzical look. Bobby seemed to just feel Dean’s unspoken question hanging in the air, because he didn’t pause his search for beer to look up before he answered. “It never happened. Heaven ain’t just relivin’ your greatest hits anymore.”</p><p>“Huh,” Dean paused, considering that. “Jack?”</p><p>Bobby pulled two bottles out of the ice, and wrenched the caps off with the blade of his scythe. Dean stifled a small smile at that – Billie would’ve <em>lost</em> it to see someone treat the scythe that way, but Dean thought the Old Death might’ve gotten a kick out of it.</p><p>“Yep. It’s all one big Heaven now. A real life after life.” Bobby passed one of the bottles to Dean. “You boys raised him right.”</p><p>Dean <em>did</em> smile at that one as he raised the bottle to take a swig. There was no chance he could stifle the bittersweet pride that came along with the knowledge that Jack had turned out more than okay. That Dean had been wrong, and Cas had been right.</p><p>“This is shit beer, Bobby.”</p><p>Bobby shrugged. “Only the best beyond the pearly gates,” he said as he took a drink. “What, you were expecting somethin’ fancy?”</p><p>Dean stared down at his hands and picked absently at the label on his beer. “I don’t know what I expected.” He looked out at the expanse of pine beyond the edge of the Roadhouse’s lot. “Not this,” he murmured. “Not Heaven.”</p><p>“You idjit,” Bobby snarked. “You saved the whole damn world and you still think you outta be in Hell? You’re denser than a bowl’a motel oatmeal.”</p><p>“Ha,” Dean breathed a short, humorless laugh. “I thought I was supposed to go to the Empty.”</p><p>Bobby hummed in agreement. “You were. But you’re human. You got a soul. I still get final say. And when you kicked it an’ I saw where your ticket was punched,” he shook his head. “I ripped up Billie’s plan.”</p><p>Dean just stared down into the neck of his beer bottle at that, watching the bubbles in his drink fight their way to the surface. Deep down, he was relieved, but it came tainted with the disappointment that now he and Cas were forever a universe apart.</p><p>But he’d had more family who’d died, who’d hopefully gone to Heaven. Dean chewed the inside of his lip. A question pressed heavy on his shoulders. Bobby watched him carefully.</p><p>“Your mom lives down the road,” he finally said, lifting the bottle to half-point out at the gravel.</p><p>“Just mom?” The question rolled out of his mouth just a touch too fast to be casual. Dean gathered himself, hiding his trepidation with another swig of beer.</p><p>“He don’t belong here, Dean.”</p><p>Dean looked back down at his hands, lost for words as he processed that. His fingers worked more of the label off the bottle as he searched to name the emotion washing over him. It wasn’t one he felt often. Where he expected guilt, or fear, like this was somehow his fault, there was only … relief. <em>No. Safe.</em> He felt safe.</p><p>“He chose it,” Bobby said, not bothering to hide the disdain in his voice like he’d had when John was still alive. “The second he raised a hand against you, he bought a ticket down.”</p><p>The breath Dean hadn’t realized he was holding gushed out of him. He hunched over, pressing the mouth of the bottle to his forehead and squeezing his eyes shut. He felt Bobby clasp a hand on his shoulder briefly while he collected himself.</p><p>Finally, Dean sat back up. It was only then he realized how quiet and still everything was. If this Heaven had everyone all in one place, shouldn’t the Roadhouse be bustling and full of souls? He should be hearing the chatter of excited voices, the clinking of glasses, the clacking of a game of pool. But there was just the soft rustle of a breeze through the forest and the sound of their breathing.</p><p>“Where is everyone?”</p><p>“Jack’s off-world,” Bobby said, heaving a sigh. “Boy’s got it in his head he has to bring back every reality Chuck took off the air. Reckon he’ll be gone a while.”</p><p>Dean took another sip of beer, the lukewarm liquid tasting like a bag of stale, forgotten tortilla chips left under the seat of the Impala. It really was shit. But it was what they’d always drank at Bobby’s way back when. Back when Dean would sneak one out of the fridge as a teenager and Bobby would pretend not to notice, back when Dean would drink his frustrations away, back when Bobby would hand him a bottle on the back porch and just sit there in silence when he knew somehow that Dean just needed someone to <em>be</em> there for him in a way his old man never was. The beer itself was cheap and badly brewed, but it tasted like memories, and good ones at that.</p><p>“Sounds like Jack,” Dean said.</p><p>“Sounds like <em>you</em>,” Bobby grunted. “Always runnin’ around, fixin’ everyone and everything else, never asking what <em>you</em> want. Kid deserves better than a life with so much responsibility. Kid deserves to be a kid.”</p><p>Dean just nodded solemnly. “And everyone else?”</p><p>“You ain’t ready to see ‘em just yet.”</p><p>“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean said, the words coming out as more of an accusation than he’d intended.</p><p>“You really think I’mma just <em>let you die</em>, boy?” Bobby dropped his empty bottle back into the cooler and sifted a new one out of the ice. “I’m Death now,” he said as he cracked open the beer with his scythe again. “This shit ain’t just a fancy bottle opener, y’know.”</p><p>“I don’t…” Dean scrunched up his face in confusion. “Why am I here then?”</p><p>“You know why I’m Death?”</p><p>“So you could be the first to kick my ass on the other side?” Dean lifted his bottle to drain it to the dregs.</p><p>Bobby huffed a laugh. “No. I got bored.”</p><p>Dean choked on his beer, a surprised laugh tearing free and causing him to spew some of his drink. He dragged his the heel of palm across his mouth to wipe the beer and spit from his chin. “You <em>what</em>?”</p><p>“Jack meant well when he rebuilt this place,” Bobby said. “But it’s still broken. When people were lost in their memories, they didn’t know when a day or a decade went by. Now? Time is just…” He trailed off, and now it was Bobby’s turn to stare at the vast expanse of pines. “Humans ain’t built for eternity.”</p><p><em>Oh</em>. Dean nodded and set his empty bottle down gently on the patio’s stained wooden planks. That made sense. His whole life had been a mission – it’s what drove him, gave him purpose. Now, there was none of that.</p><p>“Life’s only precious because it ends,” Dean mused, recalling a quote from a book he’d once read to Jack, back when the kid was struggling to define the line of morality and where he stood on it.</p><p>“Yup, nothin’ matters without an expiration date. You spend a few decades, hell, maybe a few hundred years with your loved ones, but after that?” He shrugged. “Ain’t no point to much up here.”</p><p>“So you … what, got a job?” Dean smirked, jabbing his thumb at the scythe.</p><p>“There’s one here for you too, if you want it.”</p><p>“I thought you said you weren’t gonna ‘let me die,’” Dean said. “Besides. I already won the ‘be Death for a day’ raffle prize once. I’ll pass.”</p><p>Bobby gave Dean a curt look. “You still <em>died</em>, Dean. I can’t undo what’s been done. But you can either take the job, or let me reap your soul and whisk you away to the pearly gates where I bet you’ll go so stir-crazy you’ll’ve gone full Cujo by the time Sam gets up there.”</p><p>“Alright, alright,” Dean waved his hand dismissively. “Do I need to fill out an application?” He snorted.</p><p>“You already have.”</p><p>Dean was suddenly uncomfortable in his seat. The muscles in his back ached like they did after he’d been driving for hours. He twisted and shifted in his chair, trying to work out the tightness he suddenly felt pulling between his shoulder blades.</p><p>“What are you—?”</p><p>Bobby just shook his head. “I ain’t doin’ anything to you. I don’t have any control over this, or what you do next,” he said, leveling a serious look at Dean. “<em>You</em> do. If you wanna give up, I’ll guide you on to Heaven no questions asked. But I know you, boy, sometimes better’n you know yourself. And I know you ain’t ready to throw in the towel.”</p><p>The ache in Dean’s back grew into a searing pain, a burning along his spine. Dean’s hands were shaking, a tremble that began to spread up into his arms, and he clenched his hands into fists to try and stop it. “What,” he managed to ask through gritted teeth, “is happening to me?”</p><p>“A second chance. One you’ve more’n earned.”</p><p>Dean groaned, tipping forward out of his chair and landing hard on his knees on the wood. He barely felt the impact. Every nerve in his body was thrumming, vibrating so loud, Dean pressed his palms against his temples as if to try and shut them out.</p><p>“Jack rewrote the rules,” Bobby continued on, still sitting casually in the patio chair. Concern wrinkled in the lines around his eyes, but he didn’t intervene. He couldn’t if he tried. This was far above his pay grade. “Said it wasn’t fair that only God could create angels. How’d he put it?” Bobby tapped the armrest of his chair in thought. “'The most righteous souls, the most loving, the most <em>good</em>, could become angels after death.' Or some shit. Sounded way more poetic when he said it.”</p><p>Dean was barely listening. His arms quaked as the burning in his back spread, coursing out into his limbs, every vein beneath his skin beginning to glow a faint blue. A shout of pain wrenched its way out of his throat, and with it came the pops of shattering glass. The patio lights burst, raining shards of glass that disintegrated before they could touch Dean. Bobby muttered a curse under his breath as the beer bottle in his hand cracked and exploded.</p><p>Dean shuddered and doubled over as the burning between his shoulder blades turned to an inferno beneath his skin. Just when he thought the fire would consume him, he flexed his shoulders and a thunderous <em>crack</em> split the air. As just as suddenly as it came, his pain vanished.</p><p>Dean leaned forward onto his palms, his chest heaving as he sucked in several deep breaths. The air felt charged, the scent and stillness akin to the moments following a lightning strike. Slowly, Dean pushed away from the ground and rose to a stand, examining his hands. The blue light he’d seen in his veins faded back down, now imperceptible beneath his skin.</p><p>“Well I’ll be damned,” Bobby whistled. “Ain’t never seen anything like that before.”</p><p>“So what, that’s it?” He didn’t feel very different than he had before, though it was hard to tell considering a few moments ago he was wracked with excruciating pain. His baseline was skewed; his nerves hadn’t quite calmed down just yet.</p><p>“For a hunter, you’re an oblivious sonuva bitch. I’d tell ya to look in a mirror, but I think you shattered all the glass within a mile of here,” He barked a laugh. Ellen wasn’t gonna be too happy about that. “Look around, son.”</p><p>Dean squinted at Bobby with suspicion before turning to glance over his shoulder. What he saw nearly made him leap out of his skin. Dean jerked sideways, startled, before realizing the giant dark mass of feathers was attached to him. Dean’s surprise rippled through the feathers, which puffed up in response.</p><p>He glanced over to Bobby, his eyes wide with shock, but Bobby offered no help. Instead, he was doubled over in laughter, hands on his knees to brace himself.</p><p>“You idjit,” he cackled, trying to catch his breath. “I seen <em>kittens</em> handle seein’ their tails for the first time better’n you!”</p><p>“Shut up,” Dean snapped. “I’d like to see you do any better if you sprouted two new freakin’ limbs all of a sudden.”</p><p>Bobby wheezed, lifting his hat and wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand. He grinned at Dean. “Fair ‘nough.”</p><p>Dean stepped off the patio and padded into the grass, giving himself enough space to examine the … wings. <em>His</em> wings. He knew the angels had them, but had only ever seen hints of what they’d left behind in shadows and scorch marks. Even when Michael had possessed him, Dean had been kept locked away in the recesses of his mind. He’d felt them, sure. But he’d never <em>seen</em> them. Not like this.</p><p>He flexed one wing, slowly unfurling it as wide as it would go. The dark feathers shimmered an iridescent blue-green, reflecting an ocean’s depth he felt he could get lost in. The feathers closest to him were a stark contrast to the primaries, which extended into a brilliant white, and were then tipped in black like a knife’s edge. The further out along the wing he looked, the more translucent the feathers became, the sun glinting through them like stained glass.</p><p>They looked sharp. Dangerous. Like they could slice the air itself in half.</p><p>He stretched out his other wing, testing the movement, flaring them out to the side, then up, furling and unfurling them separately at first, then together. He marveled at the way the feathers folded and splayed with the movement, the way they ruffled in the breeze and glimmered in the sunlight. They were stunning. He distantly wondered what Cas’s wings had looked like before he’d fallen, and now deeply regretted not getting the chance to see them. He was sure even his wings, as sleek and beautiful as they were, wouldn’t hold a candle to Cas’s.</p><p>He flicked his wings forward, and the gust of wind from even that slight movement nearly knocked Bobby on his ass from where he stood on the steps. The wings felt powerful. <em>He</em> felt powerful. He felt alive.</p><p>“I don’t deserve this,” Dean said, his voice low.</p><p>“An’ I could tell you all the ways you’re wrong, but I don’t got forty years to prattle on about it,” Bobby grumbled. “An’ that’d only scratch the surface. Besides,” Bobby said, stepping off the patio toward Dean. “This ain’t just a second chance for you.”</p><p>Dean met Bobby’s eyes, trying not to let the sudden hope he felt rising in his chest get the better of him.</p><p>“Humans can’t just waltz into the Empty, Dean.” He gestured to Dean’s wings. “But Angels can.”</p><p>It was no use. He couldn’t quell the hope that rose and broke over him like a wave. His wings flared reflexively, betraying the privacy of his thoughts, as his doubt ebbed into resolve. “I’m gonna get him out,” he whispered.</p><p>Bobby wrestled with a smile and pulled Dean into a hug. “You didn’t die in that barn for nothin’, son. You’ve never done anythin’ for nothin’. Family don’t end in blood, boy,” Bobby said, landing a firm pat on Dean’s back before pulling back to look him in the eye, his hand clamped tight on Dean’s shoulder. “And neither do you.”</p><p>Dean savored the moment, leaning slightly into the touch and taking a steadying breath.</p><p>“What now?” He said, after several long seconds.</p><p>Bobby’s hand fell away and he shrugged. “The Empty is an endless void. There ain’t exactly any maps for it. You’re gonna need something of Cas’s to track him down. Somethin’ significant.” He paused, trying to remember what he knew of the angel. “You got an old jacket or a tie or somethin’?”</p><p>“Oh. Would this work?” Dean reached down into the collar of his undershirt and pulled out a long chain. A small vial dangled on the end, and inside it swirled a luminous blue substance that somehow straddled the line between liquid and light. It glowed a soft blue, and Dean could feel his palm tingle as his own blue light rose to the surface of his skin, as though it was drawn to the vial like a magnet.</p><p>He’d always felt the presence of the vial as it hung just over his heart ever since Cas had trusted him with it. A backup plan, Cas had said, when he was weakening and running out of grace. <em>Storing some for safekeeping, if he needed a sudden power-boost.</em> Back then, Dean had hoped there had been more meaning behind the gesture than just a war tactic. Turns out, he was right.</p><p>The vial was always cool to the touch no matter how long he wore it. But now, for the first time, he could <em>feel </em>Cas’s grace whispering, calling out for him. And Dean could feel his own grace reach back.</p><p>Bobby just looked at the vial, then to Dean, and back again. A fondness spread across his face, and he chuckled as he pieced together what exactly Dean had been wearing around his neck for God knows how long. He should’ve known. He <em>did</em> know – Bobby was old, but he wasn’t blind.</p><p>“Yeah,” Bobby said, a small half-smile betraying how much he knew. “I reckon that’ll work just fine.”</p><p>Dean tucked the grace back down beneath his shirt with hands that now shook with anticipation, a cautious excitement, and raw fear.</p><p>“This is fucking crazy,” he breathed. He ran a hand through his hair. “And I fucking <em>hate</em> flying.”</p><p>Bobby just smiled at him fondly, the warmth of it crinkling in the corners of his eyes. If Dean didn’t know any better, he’d think the man looked damn proud.</p><p>“We do a lot of things we hate for love,” Bobby said.</p><p>“I—" Dean started. And where a defense would usually force its way out of Dean’s lips came a breathy sigh of acknowledgement. <em>You got me there</em>. He bit his lip in a smirk as he looked up at the man who’d raised him better than his own blood could, who’d accepted him as his own son, and he knew, here, he was safe to accept himself too. “Yeah. We do, don’t we?”</p><p>Dean’s words seemed to rip a seam in Heaven’s stitching. Dean flinched and looked up to see a jagged, inky black tear open up suddenly in the sky just over the tree line. “Is that?”</p><p>“Your way in? Yep,” Bobby said, pulling a wad of folded paper out of his vest pocket. “I took the liberty of lifting Sam’s notes from the Impala before I picked you up at the barn. That’s what took me so long. Thought they’d come in handy, an’ they did.” He glanced down at Sam’s scribbled writing, which was organized at first before being messily annotated in the margins with three different colored inks. The kid was detailed, all right, albeit disorganized. “Says here the Empty lures people in by manipulatin’ silence. So it only made sense to me that speakin’ truth would do the opposite.”</p><p><em>Fuck.</em> Right. Of course. Cas being able to open the Empty made a hell of a lot of sense now – Dean had just figured it was a clause in the deal he’d cut. He hadn’t realized that, since he’d been ripped open by the Empty, he could rip it open in return.</p><p>“Well, go on then.”</p><p>Dean looked up at the broken rip on the horizon and took one last, calming breath of Heaven’s eternal summertime air. “Thank you.”</p><p>“It was all you,” Bobby said. “I didn’t do anythin’.”</p><p>Dean shook his head slightly. “That’s not true.” For most of Dean's life, Bobby had been a home. A safe haven. The first person he'd felt safe to utter words to after nearly a year of silence as a child. And now, the first to hear his deepest truth spoken aloud.</p><p>Bobby didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. He turned back to the Roadhouse, taking the few short steps back to his patio chair and his cooler of endless crap beer. He heard a rustle of feathers, the flap of wings, and by the time he turned around, Dean was gone.</p><p>He lowered himself back down in the chair, and dug his hand much deeper into the cooler to fish a hidden bottle out of the ice. Something top-shelf, way more than he would’ve let himself splurge on in life. He cracked it open on the blade of his scythe and leaned back to stare at the inky black tear above the trees.</p><p>He took a sip, sitting sentinel at the gate toward a dark and torturous unknown. And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, he felt purpose again. He felt hope.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>magpies are pretty but rude. felt fitting</p><p>come yell at me on tumblr! @withclawsandsympathy</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>finally, we find him.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was quiet. As it should be.</p><p>There were no voices, no lights, no high-frequency souls buzzing blindingly fluorescent. There was just … dark. Like there always had been.</p><p>It had no name, the thing that resided here. The thing that … <em>was</em> “here.” At least, no name it could ever vocalize in any way that could be comprehended. It suffered through millennia of crude monikers that varied based on the form it took. The shadow, at first, for those it had yet to corrupt into a coherent shape. The darkness, one as black and gritted as coal dust, for those foolish enough to force men down into the suffocating depths of mountains whose cavernous maws were older than bone itself. Avarice always came at a price— the inevitable guilt racking up a debt that could only be paid on a deathbed, and the eternal silence that followed. A debt that could only be paid in blood.</p><p>There was one name that had briefly given it pause as it had stalked through the tangled undergrowth behind neatly manicured lawns in the deep south, stolen land once soaked in gore, now watered with greed. <em>The moss man, </em>they’d so boorishly dubbed it. It was neither moss, nor a man.</p><p>Though it wasn’t <em>Empty</em>, either.</p><p>Endless, perhaps. Vast, even.</p><p>There’s an entire world humans couldn’t see, and celestials never cared enough to look for. A realm that exists in all the empty spaces – in every crack in ice and stone, in the hollow of every root and vein, in every unused crevice inside the structures carved and erected by that so-called <em>God</em>’s discordant creations. Such wasteful creations they were, it mused with disdain. It looked upon men the way men looked upon meat.</p><p>That’s the world the Empty inhabited. Its consciousness webbed through all the minute spaces, a fungal hypha weaving through the forgotten expanse, a mycorrhizal network festering in the wounds of the in-between. An incomprehensibly vast biome branching into a single consciousness. <em>The Empty</em>, they’d called it. How repugnant. It was anything but.</p><p>The Empty sank deeper into its slumber, a tonic immobility disseminating its consciousness out once more into every capillary of its vastness. It was a rest it had long been denied. But now – now that it was no longer being used as a pawn in a celestial power-grab, now that that abhorrent <em>soul</em> had been snuffed out, through luck, no less – the waking angel had fallen silent, and the Empty could return to its preferred stasis of silence.</p><p>As the corpses within it dreamt, reliving their deepest regrets in an eternal hibernation, it feasted on the morsels of their despair. The Empty sank through the beings locked within it – sank through the amber memories of a demon who’d preyed on the corrupted blood of children; waded through the pain of an angel to whom violence was the only form of justice she’d ever known; became awash in the regret of a self-named king who’d learned to love just a little too late.</p><p>It stretched out, unfurling its parasitic vines toward every decaying corpse, cultivating its precious, endless garden of guilt and silence and rot. It began to reach, reaching toward its latest prey; the obstinate angel who’d refused to give in. Who’d caused the Empty so much pain.</p><p>Now, the angel was broken. When the intolerably bright soul vanished, so did the angel’s will. It was no matter, in the end. You don’t hold a grudge against the pig you’ve sent to slaughter.</p><p>Meat was meat.</p><p>The Empty closed in, readying its thorns to sink into the angel’s flesh. It would drain this one much slower, it thought. It deserved to relish in the flavor of his fears and remorse. It had been so very patient, after all.</p><p>It coiled and curled, slithering steadily, baring its barbs like fangs when the light – oh, that painful, dreadful, <em>hateful</em> burning light – came rushing back in. The Empty snapped back, jolting out of its rest as something came crashing into its domain. Something different than all the rest who lie here.</p><p>Something <em>alive</em>.</p><p>The Empty bared its endless rows of teeth inside its thousands of mouths, flexing its expanse of needles and thorns and claws. The ooze it rose from boiled with a primordial rage as it turned toward the source of the noise, a harsh and grating discord in the distance. The Empty tore toward it, rising and rolling in a tsunami of frenzied blades sharpened with hatred.</p><p>Whatever, whomever had just come crashing in, would never leave. Only one thing ever had.</p><p>And the Empty wasn’t making that mistake again.</p><hr/><p>Dean heard a gut-wrenching <em>crunch</em> when he hit the ground.</p><p>He skidded forward on his shoulder, his wings haphazardly thrown around himself in a last-second <em>oh, shit</em> maneuver when he’d realized he was about to crash. Of course he’d break something on his first time in the air – he knew he just wasn’t meant to fly.</p><p>Dean carefully unfurled his wings, hesitantly peering out through the spaces between the tips of his feathers. <em>Wait</em>. <em>Was that—?</em></p><p>Grass. Trees. Dead leaves. <em>Maybe I took a wrong turn?</em></p><p>He pushed himself to a stand, spitting out a mouthful of downy feathers into his hands and wiping them down the front of his flannel. The crunch he’d heard had just been the crackling of fallen leaves, he realized with relief. Not his wings, not his bones. He squinted and turned, trying to get his bearings and—</p><p><em>Cas</em>.</p><p>The angel was facing away from him, clad in that unmistakable trench coat. His shoulders were slumped, defeated, as he stared at… <em>is that me?</em></p><p>The memory of this place, this yard, came rushing back. He’d lived here once, in a little house in a nothing town in Michigan, in the months following Sam’s sacrifice to avert the apocalypse. He’d found a surrogate family in Lisa and Ben. He’d found love, too, in a way – though it was one borne of familial obligation. At the time, that was the only love Dean knew.</p><p>This was the life he’d always thought he’d wanted, but it was hollow without Sam. Without Cas, as fledgling as their relationship had been back then, it felt empty.</p><p>And so Dean watched Cas, who watched the memory of him rake leaves.</p><p>Dean didn’t remember this. He didn’t remember running into Cas at all at this house, despite a steady stream of prayers. He’d just figured Cas hadn’t heard him, or hadn’t cared.</p><p>But this wasn’t <em>his</em> memory placing Cas here.</p><p>This was <em>Cas’s</em> memory.</p><p><em>Angels are watching over you.</em> A small, somber half-smile tugged at the corner of his lips. How right his mom had been, even if she hadn’t truly believed it herself. Even in the moments Dean hadn’t believed, either.</p><p>“Cas?” Dean said hesitantly, stepping toward where the angel stood.</p><p>Cas didn’t turn around.</p><p>“Cas, it’s me,” Dean said, reaching out a hand as he got closer. “We’ve got to—“</p><p>Just before he could lay a hand on Cas’s shoulder, the grace in the vial around his neck suddenly burned white-hot on its chain. Dean winced and stuttered backward, pawing at his chest to stop the pain—and that’s when Cas turned around.</p><p>
  <em>Not again. Oh god, not again.</em>
</p><p>This time, it wasn’t a dream. This time, he knew what he was seeing in front of him was real.</p><p>At first, Dean struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. The figure that stood before him <em>looked</em> like the Castiel he knew from a distance. It was … Cas-shaped, but little more than a blurred silhouette. It shuffled around awkwardly to face him – though <em>face</em> wasn’t quite the right word.</p><p>Teeth. Everything was teeth. Rows of human molars and canines and incisors sprouted from all the wrong places – from along its cheekbone and twisting into a gaping cavity that was a rough approximation of a mouth frozen in a scream, to rows and rows of teeth jammed together and jutting out from around the thing’s empty eye sockets.</p><p>Just like this wasn’t Dean’s memory, this illusion wasn’t built for Dean either— and so it flickered and melted into what it <em>truly</em> was. What it was built out of.</p><p>The thing pretending to be a stand-in for Cas was just raw and rotting flesh packed together into the shape of a man. Its trench coat was just skin, <em>oh god, it was just skin</em>, flaps of crudely scavenged scraps of faces and bodies stitched together with sinew.</p><p>It stuttered forward, struggling to drag itself through the deep, wet blackened mud that the ground had begun to sink into. Dean stared in horror as the thing lurched toward him.</p><p>Meat and teeth – the house, the trees, the rake the other Dean was holding, all of it was meat and teeth and gristle and bone all tangled together into one.</p><p>The thing he’d once mistaken for Cas reached toward him with a piecemeal hand made from a thousand other corpses, and it began to bleed. Blood dripped from between the hundreds of teeth protruding from its face, smeared across its hands, seeped from between all the grotesque stitches of its fleshy jacket.</p><p>Dean scrambled backward, realizing with a deepening dread that the dead leaves crunching beneath his feet <em>were</em> bones, just not his. Dean slipped, falling flat on his ass in what felt like wet grass, but he knew was anything but. He made the mistake of glancing down at his hands and confirmed what he already knew was true.</p><p>It was blood. All of it was blood. It bubbled from the ground and pooled around his ankles, churning into a dark, gory crimson.</p><p>The grace around his neck burned as a warning as the thing grew closer. Dean winced, raising his hands and ready to cut his fists on the teeth of this thing’s jawline, when the necklace suddenly seemed to pull his attention elsewhere.</p><p>The grace inside the vial pooled down to the bottom of the glass, and pulled Dean’s grace down with it. He could feel it nagging in the base of his skull, the undeniable feeling he had to <em>move, </em>and had to move … down.</p><p>“You sure?” He rasped, low and hesitant, to the vial, watching as the malignant creature of meat and bone came within just feet of him. He gagged on its scent, one that carried a sickly sweet tang of decay that scraped up his sinuses. Just one more step, and it’d be upon him.</p><p>The vial didn’t answer, of course. But with one deep breath – one that stung of copper and rot – he squeezed his eyes shut, flared his wings and plunged down into the murky depths of blood.</p><p>He heard the faint splash of the thing clambering after him, but it couldn’t sink into a different plane like Dean could. For the first time, Dean was grateful for his wings.</p><p>Time suddenly lost all meaning. There was no light, no wind, no macabre illusions here. It felt … empty.</p><p>He drifted for what may have been a lifetime. It was pitch dark. He knew he couldn’t see his hands – if he even knew where those were right now – no matter how close he held them to his face. The only sign he had that he even still existed was the soft beating of his wings, and the pull of his grace. He couldn’t feel anything else. All of his nerves had gone numb.</p><p>He whispered a quiet prayer to Cas’s grace as he flew. Dean didn’t know which way was up – or if there even <em>was</em> an “up” here – but he laid his trust in Cas’s grace to guide him. This place was endless, dark and devoid of hope – and he couldn’t let go of the nagging fear that it would be so, so easy to get lost in this labyrinth of empty. He steeled himself, focusing only on <em>forward</em>, only on the gentle heat from the necklace nudging him on. With love as his compass, he let Cas pull him through the expanse like the tide.</p><p>Eventually, the tug of his grace began to intensify. He must be growing closer. Feeling trickled back into Dean’s body – he felt his breath hitch, his heart quicken, his wingbeats strengthen. Purpose rushed through him, remapping his deadened nerve endings, piecing him back together. He reached out with a hand he could suddenly feel, ready to pierce the veil of where he flew between planes of reality in this darkened, empty husk of a world—when something snagged around his ankle.</p><p>Dean shouted in surprise. Sharp barbs punctured his skin, and he could feel the sear of blisters bubbling up from around the wound. Vines of darkness he couldn’t see tangled around his wings.</p><p>Dean flailed, twisting and punching at the void as it trapped him in its thorny snares. He felt his own blood trickle down his arms and legs and wings, dripping to join the blood of thousands that sat stagnant somewhere in the distance here. But his pain paled in comparison to the dread that climbed up his spine as he <em>felt</em> the Empty’s rage flare up around him.</p><p>It spoke no words, for it had no mouth to speak from in this realm – but Dean’s eardrums pounded with the reverberations of a sound at a frequency he could not hear, but knew was a scream. He wrestled in its grasp, desperation rising in his throat. With one, pained and defiant scream of his own, something sharp slid down his forearm.</p><p>His hand clasped around the hilt of cool metal, a stark contrast to the fire the Empty’s blisters trailed along his skin. An angel blade. <em>His</em> angel blade.</p><p>Dean couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could <em>feel</em> it. What he’d always believed to simply be a weapon like any other enchanted knife, turned out to be an extension of himself. Of his consciousness. Of his very being. He could feel his grace thrumming into the tip of the blade as it tore through the Empty’s grip on him; could feel it as though it were his own hand clawing through it.</p><p>Suddenly, Cas trusting him with his own blade all those years ago carried a new weight.</p><p>Dean spun, ripping the blade through the vines that trapped his wings. The grace around his neck was crying out, begging him to move forward – but he couldn’t. The Empty’s thicket of razors and teeth and blistering branches was far too dense.</p><p>With one final slash, Dean burst free, and with an urgent and broken whisper, apologized to the vial.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he breathed, pressing his lips against the glass. He clamped his wings in close to his body and freefell further into the dark. He had to find a new way through. “Just hold on a little longer, buddy. I’m coming.”</p><hr/><p><em>Run</em>.</p><p>He’d first heard the word as a desperate plea gurgling out of Not-Cas’s mouth in that motel room dream of decay and despair. He’d heard it again, echoing in his brain as he rushed into the decrepit barn destined to become his deathbed.</p><p>Now, he was finally heeding the warning.</p><p>Dean hit the ground running. He’d fallen through the void, twisting and slashing at the Empty’s frenzied attacks at every turn, before crash-landing into another illusion carefully crafted to torture Cas.</p><p>The sudden brightness of it was blinding. He landed hard on a neatly manicured lawn on a sunny weekday afternoon, surrounded by the charred corpses of dead angels. Dean sprang to his feet. He didn’t take time to examine the scene. This illusion wasn’t meant for him – it wouldn’t last long. As soon as he broke into this memory, the timer was set, and the seconds ticked down to a gory reveal he sure as hell didn’t want to see.</p><p>Dean spun on his heel and sprinted, sprinted through the once-peaceful garden, pushing past a man blissfully flying a kite, his feet kicking up the ashes of burned wings as he wove through the celestial mass grave.</p><p>The illusion began to melt away, the blades of grass flickering into pale blades of bone, the trees beginning to weep dark gore from between the bark, the angels’ features melting into twisted flesh and teeth. He didn’t dare look back, but he could feel blood beginning to rise from the earth, lapping at his heels.</p><p>He never thought he’d <em>want</em> to fly, but every step had him wishing he was in the air, teleporting away from whatever this was. But the void between the memories was far too dangerous. It wasn’t a void at all – it wasn’t empty, it <em>was</em> the Empty. He couldn’t risk blindly stumbling through its domain again.</p><p>So instead, he raced through the pockets of its veins, hoping he was moving fast enough to stay just out of its reach. His lungs burned as he ran full-tilt into the trees. He didn’t know how long he’d have to keep this up. How long he <em>could</em> keep this up. But with every step, he swore the grace in the vial around his neck glowed just a little bit brighter, a little bit warmer—and so he didn’t slow down.</p><p>The trees melted into a blur as he sprinted through them. Darkness fuzzed around the edges of his vision as the bright makeshift sun behind him began to melt into something sinister. He swore he could see things moving in between the trees, like vines snaking toward him through the undergrowth, but he refused to look. He just ran, focusing on every step. Every step that brought him closer to Cas.</p><p>The world around him grew darker and darker, the light falling away until only darkness remained. He was running blind once again. Fear spiked up his spine, muddling his senses. He couldn’t tell if the noises around him were from his own footfalls and labored breath, or something clambering just a half-step behind him. Dean gritted his teeth, gripping the vial of grace in one hand and his angel blade in the other, and with one last push off the ball of his foot he sliced his blade through the dark and leapt into another hellish memory.</p><p>This was one he, unfortunately, recognized.</p><p>Dean tumbled forward as he hit the ground, tucking into a roll. This memory was a painful one. Another effigy of Cas, his knuckles bloodied, one fist gripping the front of the memory of Dean’s jacket, the other pointing an angel blade at his throat. Dean caught a glimpse of his own bruised and broken face, and heard the echo of his long-ago plea. One that still rang true now. <em>I need you.</em></p><p>Dean didn’t break his stride to look. This scene already lived in his head in crystal clear high-def. And even when the crypt flickered around him, melting into the bunker library and flipping the script, and he saw himself now poised with a blade at Cas’s throat – he kept sprinting.</p><p>He ducked down one of the bunker’s many hallways, half-drifting around the turn as his boots lost traction on the slippery tile, and suddenly he wasn’t in the bunker anymore.</p><p>And there wasn’t a clear path to run through.</p><p>Before Dean could even think to hit the brakes, his foot snagged on something large, and he fell forward. Dean threw out his hands to catch his fall, and he heard cracking followed by a wet, sickening <em>squelch</em> as his palms sank into something rotting.</p><p>The second he heard something crack, a sharp, searing pain spiked in his ribs – as though he’d cracked his <em>own</em> bones. He cried out in pain, wrenching his eyes shut and clasping a damp, filthy hand around his side.</p><p><em>Please don’t be a person</em>, he pleaded in his mind. His other hand was still sunk deep into something rotting, and the now all-too-familiar reek of decay stung his nostrils. <em>Please let this be a memory of some time you accidentally hit a deer or somethin’, Cas.</em></p><p>But the universe had never been that kind to him. Dean’s heart pounded in his chest. He forced himself to open his eyes, and came face to face with the lifeless husk of himself.</p><p>Dean staggered to his feet, sucking in a surprised breath he instantly regretted. His lungs burned with a stabbing pain on every labored inhale. He squinted down at the body at his feet. Its ribs were crushed from his fall. He blinked down at his own torso, his arm still wrapped tight around himself, where his own ribs felt crushed.</p><p>Dean swayed on his feet a little – desperately needing air but struggling to breathe – and tried to focus. He pressed two fingers gingerly against his side, and in a flash of heat, the pain was gone. He straightened up, looking down disbelievingly at his hands. That angel mojo was good for something after all.</p><p>On a whim, he pressed his foot on the corpse’s leg, and felt the same pressure on his own leg – right in the same spot. <em>Huh</em>. Then, he reeled back and <em>kicked</em> it, right in the knee.</p><p>“Ah, <em>fuck!</em>” He hissed, grabbing his own knee and stumbling back, half-tripping as he stepped on something behind him. He heard something else crack, and pain shot through his right hand. “Shit!”</p><p>He caught his balance, quick to heal his broken hand and bruised knee. There was probably a much better, less painful way to test his theory. But it was too late for that.</p><p>“Okay,” he exhaled, the word slipping out with his breath as he took stock of his surroundings. He glanced back to see what he’d tripped over, already knowing the answer. It was another corpse, another carbon copy of <em>him</em>. “Okay.”</p><p>This somehow didn’t feel like the worst thing he’d seen. Even as he scanned the room – a cavernous steel and concrete warehouse – and his eyes fell on body after body, all bloodied and lifeless Dean Winchesters laying crumpled in decomposing heaps, it didn’t bother him as much as he thought it should have.</p><p>Sure, that shit was unsettling. But the bodies weren’t Sam. They weren’t Cas. Hell, they weren’t Charlie or Jack or anyone else he loved. If one of them had to be killed hundreds of times – maybe thousands, by the look of it here – he’d fall on that sword every damn time.</p><p>The feeling that clenched his gut looking out at the endless rows of his own corpses wasn’t fear. It was anger. Anger that someone had even forged this memory in Cas’s head. That it was one that pained Cas the most.</p><p>That it was one he was being forced to relive over and over in an endless, hellish loop.</p><p>Dean wanted nothing else than to tell Cas it was okay. That he didn’t blame him for this, that he knew this wasn’t him, that he knew he’d never hurt Dean on purpose. Dean wanted to chip away at all the regret that strung this memory up in Cas’s head until it finally snapped free and tumbled out of his consciousness forever. Fuck it, he wanted to <em>hold</em> Cas, hold him close and whisper all of this into his temple. His chest ached with it.</p><p>The vial around his neck hummed in tune with his thoughts, thrumming softly against his chest. He was close. He could feel it reverberating within his own grace. Dean picked his way through the bodies, breaking into a light jog. It was as fast as he could move, given there wasn’t a lot of floor space to work with. Dean didn’t quite know where he was going – as far as he could tell, this room had no doors, no windows, no hint of a way out.</p><p>Dean didn’t slow down, despite the lack of a plan. He fully intended to keep running, and if he hit a wall without an exit, well <em>hell</em>, he’d make his own. That was the plan – brute strength and a give ‘em hell attitude.</p><p>At least, that was until he noticed all the bodies were laying in the same direction. As if … they were pointing to something. They’d seemed haphazardly strewn around the warehouse at first, but the deeper he moved into the room, the more clear the picture became. They were <em>placed</em> that way.</p><p>All of the corpses were arranged in a massive spiral, a collection of macabre arrows all pointing to a chair in the center of the room.</p><p>That’s when he saw him.</p><p>“<em>Cas!</em>”</p><p>Cas. The <em>real</em> Cas. He wasn’t sure how he knew that this one wasn’t a fake, but he didn’t care to question it. He moved to sprint toward him, but the need to be near him <em>now </em>triggered a higher instinct he had yet to fully grasp. And with an ear-splitting <em>crack</em>, Dean’s wings burst out from where he’d tucked them out of sight in the ether, and before he could blink, he was at Cas’s side.</p><p>“Cas,” he breathed, and the word came from his lips more as a plea, a desperate prayer, than a name.</p><p>Cas was sitting rigid in the chair, all his muscles tensed as if he were frozen between fight or flight. He didn’t seem to notice Dean. Instead, Cas’s gaze was locked on a long, dark, needle-sharp vine that descended from the ceiling and hung just millimeters from Cas’s eye.</p><p>Dean followed the vine with his eyes, glancing up to the source. Thick, oozing tendrils of darkness coiled around the rafters, slowly winding down the pillars and toward the multitude of dead bodies. Toward Cas. The vines throbbed, swelling and compressing as though they were alive. As though they were all breathing in unison.</p><p>“Cas, listen to me,” Dean said, concern lacing his voice with an urgency he hoped would reach Cas. “We have to move, <em>now</em>.”</p><p>Cas didn’t move, didn’t react.</p><p>“Hey, <em>hey!</em>” Dean snapped his fingers in front of Cas’s unblinking eye, the one that didn’t have a sharp needle in front of it waiting to strike. Cas said nothing. “Please, buddy.”</p><p>“You can drill into my head, Naomi, but you cannot make me hurt him,” Cas said, his voice steady, defiant as he stared down the barrel of the vine like a challenge.</p><p>Dean nearly fell to his knees in relief when he heard that gravelly voice, the one he hadn’t truly heard since he lost Cas to the Empty all those weeks ago. It felt much longer than that. Every day without Cas felt like a lifetime alone.</p><p>“Cas, it’s me.” Dean laid a hand on Cas’s forearm, and Cas flinched. Dean’s heart dropped.</p><p>“How many times are you going to make me do this before you’re satisfied?” He snarled. “Is 1,746 not enough for you? If you think one more will tip the scale, maybe it’s <em>you</em> who needs to be reset, Naomi.”</p><p>Dean squeezed his hand around Cas’s forearm, but Cas kept speaking to the memory of an angel who wasn’t there.</p><p>“You will not find my breaking point. You cannot even fathom it.”</p><p>“I’m not one of Naomi’s tricks,” Dean pleaded, moving in front of Cas so he’d have to look at him. To <em>see</em> him. “It’s me. Dean. The real deal.”</p><p>Cas squinted slightly, and though his eyes were still locked on the needle, his focus seemed to soften.</p><p>“You say that every time,” he murmured. “She makes you say that every time.”</p><p>“Does she make me say that we need to get out of here? That you’re in the Empty, not Heaven?”</p><p>Cas blinked, confusion flitting across his face. But he still wouldn’t look at Dean.</p><p>“Does she make me say that I won’t leave here without you?”</p><p>Cas shut his eyes.</p><p>“Does … does she make me say,” he choked on the words, “that you were wrong about the one thing you thought you couldn’t have?”</p><p>Finally, <em>finally</em>, Cas met Dean’s eyes. But his face wasn’t full of surprise, or relief, or realization.</p><p>It was pain. Just pain. Cas’s mouth quivered as he broke away and looked back up at the mass of darkness that hung in heavy strands above their heads.</p><p>“I didn’t think you would stoop so low, Naomi,” he said to the darkness. “But I now know for certain this isn’t him.”</p><p>Now it was Dean’s turn to flinch. “Dammit, Cas,” he growled, feeling the words like a punch to the gut.</p><p>Dean had been hoping to somehow sneak out of here, to wrap Cas up in his arms and make a break for it, but he hadn’t accounted for the angel to be in some sort of trance. It looked like he was going to have to confront the Empty itself to snap Cas out of it – and he’d have to deal the first blow.</p><p>Dean flexed his hand, and felt the cool metal of his angel blade slide down into his grip. This was the first chance he really got to look at it. The blade looked like it was carved from obsidian. The weapon was a deep, inky black, but when he turned it in his hands, it caught the light from the warehouse’s harsh fluorescents and shimmered streaks of teals and purples and golds as though it contained galaxies of its own.</p><p>He raised his arm, the blade glinting in the light, and slashed through the vine in front of Cas’s face. The weapon sliced through it effortlessly, the chunk of darkness falling to the floor and writhing on the concrete. The other half of the vine snapped up toward the ceiling with a hiss.</p><p>Cas slumped forward. Dean rushed in, cupping Cas’s face in his hands and lifting his chin.</p><p>“I’m not leaving you this time,” he said softly, swiping his thumbs across Cas’s cheeks. “I’m not letting you stay behind like a fucking martyr.” Dean leaned forward, pressing his forehead against Cas’s. He took a shaky breath. “We’re either both getting out, or we’re both staying.”</p><p>A hesitant hand reached up and pressed against Dean’s chest. Dean pulled back just enough to see that Cas was staring at him in disbelief. They paused there, somehow both out of time and suspended in an endless moment together, Cas’s hand splayed over Dean’s heart for several beats.</p><p>“Dean?” Cas’s voice rasped.</p><p>All Dean could do was grin and blink back the tear that threatened to fall and spoil the moment. “Yeah,” he choked out.</p><p>Cas tried to scowl, and failed. “I told you to run.”</p><p>“Yeah, well,” he huffed a laugh. “I’m shit at following orders.”</p><p>“Clearly.” A small, tired smile tugged at Cas’s lips. Cas had drifted through a timeless eternity of horrors and, despite sitting in a room littered with a thousand corpses of his regrets, Dean’s smile was infectious.</p><p>“C’mon,” Dean said, helping Cas to a stand. “We gotta bolt. You wouldn’t happen to conjure up a memory of a big emergency exit door or—“</p><p>“Dean.” Cas stiffened in Dean’s grip. There was a shuffling, a small sound echoing hundreds of times over, bouncing off the cavernous walls of the warehouse and rolling into something much louder. Cas took an instinctive step back, throwing a protective arm in front of Dean’s chest.</p><p>The corpses.</p><p>They were <em>moving.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>this chapter lowkey tried to kick my ass. i'll get my revenge in the next chapter, which will finally have some soft moments, don't worry! i won't torture our boys for much longer &lt;3</p><p>come yell at me on tumblr! @withclawsandsympathy</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Chapter 11</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>in which Dean makes a Die Hard reference, but very much wants to live</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong><span class="u">Part Four</span>: What Carries On</strong>
</p><p>The sound the bodies made as they crawled forward – dragging their heavy, decaying flesh across the concrete, struggling to stand on hollow bones – was something Dean knew would take every drop of whiskey in the world to forget.</p><p>“Get back,” Cas hissed, his arm pressed tight against Dean’s chest.</p><p>“To <em>where</em>, exactly?” They were in the center of the room with no wall to back up against. They were absolutely surrounded. Dean spun to guard Cas’s back, his blade instinctively slipping down his arm and into his hand.</p><p>He felt Cas’s shoulder flex, followed by a growl of frustration. Dean shot a look over his shoulder, and caught Cas looking down at an empty hand.</p><p>“My angel blade,” he said. “It’s not manifesting.”</p><p>“Cas—“ Dean warned, his eyes widening, as one of his own corpses had staggered to a stand and was reaching for Cas. He felt Cas’s arm stiffen, his hand curling into a fist, and— “Cas, <em>wait</em>!”</p><p>His shout came just a second too late. Cas launched his fist at the thing’s face, clearly no longer held back by the fact that these <em>looked</em> like Dean. He knew who the real Dean was, and every ounce of his trepidation had vanished. Cas’s fist connected with its jaw, and with a sickening crack, the thing crumpled at his feet.</p><p>But so did Dean.</p><p>“<em>Fuck</em>!” Dean spat through a mouthful of blood. He fell to his knees, clutching his own jaw as an agonizing heat pulsed beneath his skin. He struggled to control his breathing, taking in deep breaths through his nose to get a grip on the pain.</p><p>He felt a hand fall tentatively on the crook of his neck, and he slowly looked up to see a bewildered and horrified Cas staring back at him.</p><p>Dean couldn’t speak – any motion involving his head sent a spike of crippling pain through his body. <em>Damn, could that angel throw a punch.</em> <em>Baby in a trench coat, my ass.</em></p><p>“I could…” Cas said quietly, his brow furrowing with a sort of helpless concern. “I can try to…”</p><p>“Mn… no,” Dean managed grit out between his teeth. Cas was running on almost zero angel mojo. He didn’t want him wasting a single drop of what little grace he had left on this—on something he could now heal himself. Dean gripped Cas’s wrist and squeezed, then closed his eyes and focused. He felt a calm warmth rise from where his palm was pressed against his cheek, a comforting heat as the shards of splintered bone in his jaw fused back together.</p><p>It only took a moment. Suddenly, the pain in Dean’s face was just a memory, and the pool of blood between his teeth evaporated into nothing.</p><p>Confusion crossed Cas’s face. He blinked down at Dean. “That wasn’t me.”</p><p>Dean nodded, taking his first deep breath that wasn’t edged with agony, and let Cas help him to a stand. “I know. Don’t freak out.”</p><p>Cas squinted and watched Dean carefully from the corner of his eye, his gaze falling to the oil-black blade in Dean’s grasp before dragging slowly back up to Dean’s face. In that moment, Dean felt – oddly – laid bare.</p><p>“I may have, uh. Picked up a few things.”</p><p>“You have grace.”</p><p>“That too,” he said, pulling Cas a half-step back as more of the corpses around them folded up into a stand. “Look, you can grill me later but right now—“</p><p>Suddenly, all the bodies around them froze, their shambling suspended, their steps hanging in midair. The air in the room went cold and stale. The dark vines that dangled around them retreated up into the ceiling, snapping as they coiled back into a large, dark mass.</p><p>The darkness poured down from where it had pooled itself in the rafters, a steady stream of black ooze slowly taking shape as it touched the ground. And out of the viscous, oily black – a shade so dark it swallowed any shred of light that came near it – stepped the visage of a man that cut Cas to the core. Cas flinched, stumbling back until he collided with Dean.</p><p>Dean was wrong about this room. This, while certainly one of Cas’s most hurtful and troubling memories, wasn’t his greatest regret. It was simply another device meant to torture him, an appetizer for the main course.</p><p>“Look what you did to me,” the man who was once a vessel for Cas, but was now a vessel for his torment snarled. “You ripped me apart. You tore my family limb from limb. You <em>stole</em> everything from me under the twisted guise of my consent.”</p><p>“Jimmy,” Cas said, his voice low and rasping with pain. With regret. “What happened to you, what happened to Claire—“</p><p>“You <em>parasite</em>!” Jimmy snapped, stalking forward.</p><p>Dean gripped Cas’s arm, and with only a brief moment of hesitation, brushed his fingers down Cas’s sleeve until his hand found Cas’s. He laced his fingers in between Cas’s and squeezed. “He’s not real,” Dean leaned forward to murmur in Cas’s ear. “That’s not Jimmy.”</p><p>“<em>You</em> don’t belong here,” The thing pretending to be Jimmy Novak sneered, raising a hand to point at where Dean stood behind Cas. “You are not dead, but you belong among them.” It flicked its hand, and in that swift, simple motion, Dean was torn away from Cas and thrown backward to land at the feet of his own shambling stolen vessels.</p><p>They were still frozen, still standing there hunched over, their arms dangling in the air, unmoving. As if… as if the Empty could only consciously control one of Cas’s regrets at a time. Dean reached up and touched the hinge of his jaw – the spot that had been shattered just moments ago, the spot where a deep blue-black bruise bloomed on every copy of himself around him – and a plan flickered into his thoughts.</p><p>Dean glanced over to Cas, still standing stock-still as the Empty approached him draped in its illusion of Jimmy. He hid behind one of the frozen bodies and shouted.</p><p>“Don’t listen to him, Cas!” He swore he could feel the Empty snap its hateful stare in his direction, but he didn’t risk looking. <em>That’s good</em>, he thought. <em>Stall the son of a bitch.</em> Dean waited a beat, trying to calculate his next move, when he heard Cas speak.</p><p>“I understand the pain I caused you, and your family, viscerally,” Cas said. “The pain of losing a child, of losing the ones you love. And it happened to you by my hands. I am truly sorry.”</p><p>“Shut the <em>fuck</em> up!” Not-Jimmy screeched.</p><p>Dean took the chance to duck and roll, picking a new corpse to hide behind from several feet away. He didn’t want the Empty to hone in on him just yet.</p><p>“Shut the fuck up, you are no different th—“</p><p>“Cas!” Dean shouted, interrupting the Empty’s venomous retort. “Everything you’ve done, you’ve done because you believed it was right!” The words just tumbled out of him as he rushed to speak before the Empty could lash out again. “You sacrifice yourself over and over for everyone else.”</p><p>This time, he could <em>really</em> feel the Empty turn its rage on him. The concrete floor of the warehouse flickered and bubbled, the illusion around him retracting as the Empty seethed. Dean retreated, turning on his heel and sprinting through the rows of bodies, trying to loop around back toward Cas.</p><p>He heard Not-Jimmy snarl something else at Cas, but its words had garbled and slurred into a language he didn’t understand. But he knew that tone, that vicious, gut-wrenching tone he’d so often heard from one particular man hell-bent on cutting him down. One that had woven itself into his mind over the years. One that had grown into his own self-hating inner voice.</p><p>It was a tone he knew Cas didn’t deserve. Neither of them did.</p><p>“You’re not broken, Cas!” He gasped as he ran. “The ‘crack in your chassis’ … it isn’t damage. It’s … It’s kintsugi, man.” Dean wove through the macabre maze of himself, searching, <em>searching</em> for a way back to Cas. “Chuck controlled everything, he pulled every string, except for you. You didn’t just invent free will, Cas. You <em>are</em> it.”</p><p>He skidded into an empty pocket in the Empty’s gruesome labyrinth, the ground beneath his feet slowly sinking into ooze and blood. He could see Cas – he wasn’t far now.</p><p>“Please,” Cas said, his gaze still locked on Not-Jimmy. “Forgive me.”</p><p>Dean’s eyes widened as he saw a silver blade slide out of Jimmy’s sleeve. “You insufferable gnat,” Jimmy’s voice dripped with venom. “I’ll enjoy silencing you.”</p><p>“Dammit, Cas, you have to forgive <em>yourself</em>!” They were running out of time. Dean gritted his teeth and lifted his blade to his chest, as Jimmy lurched forward with his own blade raised toward Cas. Dean’s blade sliced easily through his own undershirt, and he held his breath as he began to carve. And not for the first time, his blood – and the blood of hundreds of bodies around him – slid down to join the blood of the Empty.</p><p>“You deserve to be happy, to be free,” Dean gasped, blood soaking into his flannel as he dragged the point of his blade through his skin. He stepped forward, needing to close the gap, needing to be close to Cas again, needing to stop the Empty. He was just a few steps away now. “You showed me that. Let me show you it, too.”</p><p>The Empty lunged forward toward Cas, and as soon as it moved, the hundreds of corpses broke free from their stasis. They surged forward in a wave of flailing arms and hands, grabbing at Dean’s ankles and wrists and arms and throat, trying to pull him under. “<em>No</em>,” Dean groaned, and the air around him rippled and cracked as his wings flared up, shoving the onslaught of corpses back.</p><p>He broke free and raced forward, grabbing Cas by the back of his trench coat and yanking him into his chest. The illusion of Jimmy faltered, stumbling as its target was pulled out of reach. It hissed and spat, its seething fury unable to be contained in the simple illusion of a human anymore, and so its form began to melt and shift into an incomprehensible mess of blackened vines and thorns weaving through decaying flesh and gristle.</p><p>Dean pulled Cas in close. “You were wrong,” he whispered into the crook of Cas’s neck. “About what you thought you couldn’t have.”</p><p>“Dean, I—“</p><p>Dean cut him off. “Do you trust me?”</p><p>“Of course.” The answer came from Cas as steady as Dean felt holding him.</p><p>The Empty’s thousands of tendrils, smeared with blood and pocked with weeping blisters and barbed with thousands upon thousands of teeth reared up around them. <em>I will destroy you</em>, it screamed into their thoughts, and the sound raked across Dean’s nerves like shards of glass scraping down metal. <em>There is nothing for you back there. Succumb.</em></p><p>But that’s where it was wrong. There was <em>everything</em> for them back there.</p><p>The countless tendrils all leveled their dangerous points toward them, forming an iron maiden of spears that threatened to skewer them both to the void for eternity. Dean clutched Cas close, wrapping an arm around his chest and gripping his shoulder tight, and raised his other, bloodied hand.</p><p>“Happy trails, Hans,” Dean quipped. He flung his wings up around Cas, the sharp feathers slicing through some of the Empty’s vines. It shrieked in fury, and just as it shot its thousands of lethal spikes forward, Dean smacked his bloodied hand against the angel banishing sigil he’d carved into his own chest.</p><p>It was a sigil an endless number of corpses forged in his image now bore. Each one burned exponentially brighter, building into a blinding light that tore holes into the Empty’s very darkness. An agonizing scream ripped from the Empty as the light grew white-hot, searing into Dean’s eyes. Dean clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut as every muscle in his body tensed around Cas, the heat of the sigil’s activation burning around them as though they were in the very pits of an inferno. Dean felt the fire of the banishing sigil course through his body, singeing his feathers, burning into his palms.</p><p>He gripped Cas tight as the world rippled and wavered around them, and with one final powerful beat of his wings, a single triumphant phrase reverberated across every wavelength of angel radio before everything went dark once more.</p><p>
  <em>Castiel is saved.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Crisp, clean air.</p><p>That’s the first scent that came into Dean’s consciousness. There was no rot, no putrid decay, no hint of humidity wafting through the air. Just the cool breeze of a late summer’s night drifting through his feathers as he laid in the grass, his wings wrapped around himself and Cas.</p><p>A small voice in his brain fretted, worrying this was just a far corner of the Empty, another illusion that was about to melt into a frenzy of flesh and teeth – but he felt steady. Calm. The grace around his neck just hummed in contentment, and the unfamiliar feeling he’d found a name for while sitting outside the Roadhouse with Bobby crept into every one of his joints: <em>Safe.</em></p><p>It was dark beneath his wings. Dean had skidded to a stop on his shoulder after throwing his wings around Cas to soften the blow on his (calculated) crash-landing. He wouldn’t admit he didn’t know any other way to land. His shoulder ached from the angelic equivalent of a gear-up landing, but he made no effort to move.</p><p>If it were up to Dean, they’d never have to move. He tilted his chin down to press his face into the back of Cas’s neck and savor the moment. He couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe Cas was here. Couldn’t believe he was here <em>in Dean’s arms</em>.</p><p>“Is this real?” He murmured into Cas’s neck. “Did we really make it out?”</p><p>Cas shifted and rolled over, careful not to tug on the feathers of the wing he was pillowed on. Dean could feel Cas’s breath hitch – or may be that was his own breath – from the sudden closeness of their faces. This was suddenly so much more intimate than holding Cas close to escape. That was necessary. That was survival. This was … vulnerable.</p><p>“I can’t imagine this would be a regret of mine,” Cas said softly. There was still some hesitancy in his voice, a minor inflection that would’ve been easily missed by anyone but Dean. They hadn’t quite cleared up what exactly <em>this</em> was between them – not having had a chance to really talk since Cas’s deathbed confession.</p><p>Dean realized his arms were still wrapped around Cas, and with a surge of nerves he hadn’t felt since he was 16, he suddenly didn’t know where his hands should be.</p><p>“These wings are … yours,” Cas said, glancing up at the wing Dean had loosely wrapped over him. The dark feathers shimmered their blue-green iridescence even under here, concealed from direct light. Cas reached up and, with a ginger touch as light as his feathers, softly stroked his fingers down the vein of a crooked feather and smoothed it back into place. The motion sent a slight shiver down Dean’s spine.</p><p>“Yeah,” Dean breathed, nodding softly as he relaxed, and exhaustion began to settle into his body.</p><p>Cas scrunched his face slightly. “You hate flying,” he said.</p><p>A stupid grin broke across Dean’s face and he shook his head. “Not for you.”</p><p>He hadn’t meant for it to come across as something so heavy, as such a sacrifice. But it was. Cas went quiet, and he felt the moment hang there in the air between them.</p><p>“I meant it, uh,” Dean was caught up in the intensity of Cas’s eyes, the distractingly deep blue that made it hard to piece together words especially when they were this close to each other. He tried to look somewhere else – his gaze flicked down to Cas’s lips – no, that wasn’t helping. He shut his eyes and took a breath, one that smelled of ozone and pine and the moment just before snowfall and <em>fuck, get it together, Winchester</em>. “When I said you were wrong,” he managed to stumble out.</p><p>He opened his eyes to find Cas still just looking at him.</p><p>“About … about what you thought you couldn’t have,” Dean said, the words heavy in his chest.</p><p>“Dean, you don’t have to—“</p><p>“Fuck, no, just let me…” He took in another deep breath to ground himself. “I’ve gone too long without saying it.”</p><p>Dean figured out what to do with his hands. He wrapped one tighter around Cas’s waist, and brought the other around to cup Cas’s jaw – more to steady himself than anything else. He opened his eyes to meet Cas’s gaze once again, and this time, he let himself be lost. “If you’ll have me,” his voice barely edged just above a whisper. “I’m yours.”</p><p>Dean’s heart pounded in his ears. The way Cas was looking at him, wide-eyed and brows pinched up – <em>fuck, what was that look?</em> <em>It was too late, wasn’t it. </em>He’d fucked it up. Of <em>course </em>he had. Cas had sacrificed everything for him, and after all his time in the Empty, he must’ve realized it wasn’t worth it. That <em>Dean</em> wasn’t worth it. That—</p><p>Dean’s spiraling train of thought immediately derailed the second he felt Cas’s hand press against his cheek. “I would do it all again, for you,” Cas whispered. “I’ll always have you.”</p><p>In that moment, those simple words pulled out a carefully placed stone in the wall Dean had spent decades building up around his heart, and suddenly the entire structure came crashing down around him. Decades of trained self-loathing, of repression and guilt, unraveled with the simple comfort of a soft brush of fingers against his cheek and the whispered sincerity of love.</p><p>Dean tilted his head forward, and though there were only a few inches between them, it felt like it took an eternity for their foreheads to touch, for their noses to brush. They hung here for a moment, their shared breaths mingling, with Dean still hesitant. Still working up the courage.</p><p>Cas reached out with his fingers and absently traced the outline of one of Dean’s feathers, and the slight shiver Dean had felt in his spine spiked into a bolt of electricity in his gut. He shuddered and curled tighter into Cas, his wing involuntarily stretching out, as though it had a mind of its own. “<em>Fuck</em>,” the word slipped out as a breathy whisper.</p><p>He needed to stop thinking about this so hard – and whatever Cas was doing here, running the pads of his fingers down his wings, pressing them ever so slightly between his feathers, was doing just that. Dean leaned into the sensation, letting the touch muffle his panicking thoughts. Dean slid his hand around to the back of Cas’s head, running his fingers through Cas’s dark hair, and finally closed the gap between them.</p><p>It was soft, at first. Still a little hesitant. He pressed his lips lightly against Cas’s, and he could feel his heart hammering against his ribs as he deepened the kiss. It only took a moment for that brief panic of ‘<em>I’m </em>kissing<em> Cas’</em> to turn into the joyous disbelief of ‘<em>I’m kissing </em>Cas.’ The hesitancy melted out of his body as he pressed up closer against the angel, <em>his</em> angel, tangling one hand in his hair and sliding the other up the back of his jacket. He loved that damn trench coat, but <em>fuck, is he wearing too many layers right now</em>.</p><p>Dean’s teeth grazed Cas’s lip, and Cas hummed into his mouth. He nipped at Cas’s lip, and was rewarded with a rough almost-moan that set the back of Dean’s neck on fire. But just when Dean thought he was in the driver’s seat here, Cas dug his fingers deep into Dean’s wing and carded them through his feathers. Dean groaned. He tightened his grip around Cas and broke the kiss as a shudder rattled though his body. A distant thought needled into his brain, <em>Cas knows exactly what he’s doing.</em></p><p>“You—<em>fuck</em>,” was the best-worded accusation Dean’s mind was able to offer right now. He could feel Cas grin against his cheek.</p><p>“You were thinking too much,” Cas whispered against the hinge of Dean’s jaw, his breath hot in Dean’s ear. Dean got his revenge by sucking a bruise into Cas’s neck. Cas hissed as he sucked in a sudden breath.</p><p>“’M not healing that for you,” Dean mumbled as he pressed a softer kiss against Cas’s throat. He worked his way down, nuzzling and nipping at Cas’s skin. Cas fumbled to keep up, loosening his tie and undoing the first few buttons of his shirt as Dean scraped his teeth along Cas’s collarbone.</p><p>Cas wrestled himself out of his shirt and jacket in a race with Dean’s lips and teeth and hands that were hell-bent on exploring every inch of skin. Cas tucked his hands underneath the hem of Dean’s shirt, dragging a feather-light touch down his stomach before digging his thumbs into Dean’s hipbones. Dean groaned and ground his hips against Cas in response.</p><p>Dean didn’t remember who moved first, but the next thing he knew, Cas was on his back in the grass, and Dean was kneeling over him. He paused, breathing hard, staring down at Cas’s face, which was flushed pink with heat. Cas was staring back at him, with an expression on his face that Dean realized he didn’t know how to read. <em>What was</em>— <em>Oh god, I fucked up again.</em></p><p>He felt the dull blade of panic drag through his nerves, and while he was sure the tension wouldn’t show on his face, he had much less control over his wings. His feathers betrayed him, fluffing up as doubt and fear rose in his chest and threatened to choke him. This couldn’t last, this couldn’t be real, he was dead, he died alone in that godforsaken barn, he couldn’t breathe, he—</p><p>He felt a hand fall firmly on his shoulder, fingers pressing into the ghost of a handprint that had been seared there long ago, and suddenly the world began to slow down.</p><p>“Breathe.” He heard Cas’s voice cut through his panic.</p><p>Dean just nodded. He sucked in a long, deep breath and slowly exhaled. He needed something more, something to ground him, and moved his hand to grip Cas’s shoulder in return.</p><p>The skin of Cas’s shoulder wasn’t smooth here – it felt puckered and rough, almost like—almost like a scar. Dean blinked open his eyes, squinting down at where his palm was pressed into Cas’s bare shoulder. Sure enough, beneath his fingers lay the burnt scorch marks of his own hand, a brand from where he’d held tightly on to Cas before he hit the angelic eject button to rocket them out of the Empty.</p><p>Dean looked disbelievingly down at his own hand – still gripping Cas’s shoulder – to Cas’s hand on <em>his</em> shoulder, and back down at Cas’s face.</p><p>And Cas was still staring back with that same expression, that same one Dean didn’t know how to read, that made the edges of his nerves feel like he’d stuck a fork into an electrical socket. But despite the live wire of his nerves, he’d found something to ground him. Some<em>one</em>.</p><p>“You’re beautiful,” Cas murmured, despite how much of a mess Dean felt like he was right now.</p><p>“I- <em>what</em>?”</p><p>“Kintsugi," he said, repeating what Dean had shouted to him in the Empty. "The art of repairing pottery with gold. Not broken. Beautiful," his voice dropped to a whisper. "Still beautiful.”</p><p>That look. The way Cas was staring at him. That wasn’t— Oh.</p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p>And on the blank page of new emotions in his brain, the one where “safe” was freshly written with still-drying ink, Dean scrawled a new word. <em>Awe.</em></p><p>“Yeah, well,” Dean deflected. “I’m sure yours were way better.”</p><p>“My…?” Cas squinted as he pieced it together. “You’re referring to my wings.”</p><p>Dean shrugged.</p><p>“I meant all of you, Dean,” Cas said, and the surety in his voice made Dean squirm. “Your wings. Your soul. <em>You</em>.”</p><p>Dean wanted to hear it. Needed <em>desperately</em> to hear it. But it was too much, all at once. It felt almost painful, like coming in from the cold and sticking your hands into hot water. It burned rather than soothed.</p><p>“Come here,” Cas rasped, and Dean didn’t have to be told twice. He practically collapsed into the space next to Cas, his wings tucking away into whatever intangible plane angel wings vanished to. He let his head fall on Cas’s chest and slung an arm around him as he zeroed his focus into every steadying breath.</p><p>Dean hadn’t expected the script to flip so suddenly. To go from undeserving knight in borrowed armor to a goddamn damsel in distress, but he didn’t let his anxious pride pull him away. This time, he let himself be held.</p><p>Exhaustion crashed over him like a wave. He didn’t know what day it was, or how long he’d waded through the Empty’s murky and hellish depths. All he knew was that wherever they’d been spit out was dark, but safe. It seemed like a clearing of some sort. A cool summer night’s breeze drifted over them, and Dean stole a glance at the spattering of stars overhead. It felt late – and after days of fighting and running, fueled only by fear and little sleep, he was crashing.</p><p>“They weren’t better.” He felt more than heard Cas’s chest rumble with the words.</p><p>“Hm?” Dean mumbled.</p><p>“My wings,” he said, pensive.</p><p>Dean pulled back, resting on his forearm to get a better look at Cas’s face. “What were they like?” he asked, absently tracing a finger up and down Cas’s chest to mask his own trepidation.</p><p>“Dark, like yours. But more so,” Cas said, his voice distant and edged with a kind of bittersweet mourning. “In Heaven’s light, they shimmered with colors you cannot perceive.” He reached up and ran the pads of his fingers lightly down the inside of Dean’s forearm, where his angel blade would manifest. “They looked a lot like your blade, actually. Almost exactly.”</p><p>“They sound… beautiful.” The word, one of such high praise, felt alien on his tongue. But despite the word’s weight to Dean, it still somehow didn’t feel like enough. “You’re wrong though, still better than mine.”</p><p>Cas tried his best not to roll his eyes, but failed. “We can respectfully disagree,” he said with a smirk – a smirk that Dean desperately wanted to wipe off his face with a kiss.</p><p>“Do you miss them?” He whispered instead.</p><p>A heavy sigh. “Always.”</p><p>An odd sort of guilt settled in Dean’s stomach. He didn’t even <em>want</em> his wings, and here he had been freakin’ flaunting them in front of Cas. He didn’t know what to do, except—</p><p>“Here,” Dean said, pulling the vial of Cas’s grace out from beneath the collar of his shirt. “You should probably take this back.”</p><p>Cas just shook his head and clasped his hand around Dean’s to stop him.</p><p>“That was a gift,” Cas said, his face softening as that small half-smile returned. “You keep those.”</p><p>Dean couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of his throat. “You remember that, huh?”</p><p>“I remember a lot of things,” he hummed. “Including the time I walked into your room while you—“</p><p>“<em>Alright</em>, alright!” Dean laughed, shoving a palm against Cas’s mouth to shut him up. “You made your poi— Jesus <em>fuck</em>, man, did you just lick my hand?”</p><p>“No,” Cas deadpanned.</p><p><em>That little shit. </em>“You’re unbelievable.”</p><p>“I prefer the term ‘insufferable.’”</p><p>Dean suppressed a snicker as he pressed a kiss to Cas’s temple. “I’ve got a better way to shut you up,” Dean mumbled into Cas’s hair, his voice dropping low.</p><p>“Show me.”</p><p>And for once, in the stolen spaces between breathless kisses, in all the empty pockets of discarded clothing and ruffled feathers, there lurked nothing ominous. Instead, they let themselves reach past the in-between, past its terrifying uncertainties, and when they reached with clasped hands into the depths of the unknown, they only found faith in each other.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This isn't the end! There's one chapter left. A soft kind of epilogue, if you will. We've gotta check in on the rest of the fam.<br/>Thanks for coming along for the ride so far, y'all are amazing and every comment and kudos literally puts me on cloud nine.<br/>Thank you all for keeping me going!</p><p>The next (final) chapter will hopefully be up soon. I already know how this ride ends. I'm excited to share it with you &lt;3<br/>Come yell at me on tumblr in the meantime! @withclawsandsympathy</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Chapter 12</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Oh my love, don't you worry<br/>When the world gets cold<br/>I'll hold your heart when it's heavy<br/>And I won't let go, no<br/>'Til my blood runs dry<br/>I will never leave your side<br/>Don't you worry<br/>Oh, I know we'll carry on</p><p>-- Young Rising Sons</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Did you miss me?” Dean gushed, stepping forward with his arms outstretched. This was perfect. Exactly how he’d envisioned it. A long-overdue and heartfelt reunion in the bunker, just like old times.</p><p>Just like the good times they should’ve had more time to have.</p><p>“Dean,” Cas said, sounding beyond tired. “Shouldn’t we have seen your brother first?”</p><p>“Shh,” Dean said, waving a hand over his shoulder dismissively. He patted the cool sleek metal of the Impala’s hood as though she were a faithful dog, waiting patiently for her owner to return from the dead. “I had to make sure Baby was okay.”</p><p>Though he was standing with his back to Cas, he could practically hear the angel roll his eyes.</p><p>“Besides,” Dean went on. “I had to check something first.” He wasn’t stalling, of <em>course</em> not. He only had to figure out how to explain becoming an angel, going into the Empty alone, somehow rescuing Cas, and also not being strictly into, well, <em>not</em>-dick anymore. Or ever, for that matter.</p><p>Sam didn’t have to know all of that, right? Maybe he’d leave some of that out. He’d certainly try, at least, so as not to fry the kid’s brain. But Dean’s verbal filter was tuned with the precision of a shitty gas station sink – it was either a glacially slow trickle, or way too much, way too fast. There was really no middle ground.</p><p>He stooped to peer into Baby’s window and – “That <em>bitch</em>!”</p><p>A silver iPod classic was mounted to the dash.</p><p>He couldn’t believe it. He could, but also couldn’t – this wasn’t the first time he’d crawled out of the ground to find Sam had douched up Baby with a freakin’ iPod. And a silver one at that. Didn’t even match Baby’s paint.</p><p>“I’m so sorry he did this to you,” Dean cooed to the Impala, pressing his cheek to her roof. “Never again.”</p><p>“<em>Dean</em>,” Cas pressed.</p><p>“Did you see this? You see what he did?”</p><p>Cas looked less than impressed.</p><p>“Fine,” Dean groaned, throwing up his hands. “I’ve just gotta do one thing.”</p>
<hr/><p>He… hadn’t heard this song in a while.</p><p>It was buried deep in an old playlist, one he rarely heard unless he put his entire iPod on shuffle, and it was even rarer for him to listen to it in its entirety. It was upbeat in its own odd kind of way, somehow both wistful in the lyrics and bright in the tempo, but it still carried too many memories.</p><p>Hell, Sam hadn’t heard Jason Manns’ voice drift out of that old iPod in more than a decade. Not since…</p><p>
  <em>Wait. Where the hell is that coming from?</em>
</p><p>He’d left his iPod hooked up in the Impala, right? But that was all the way over in the garage, far from where he was in the kitchen. This was coming from somewhere much, much closer.</p><p>As far as he knew, he was alone in the bunker. Eileen had taken Miracle, who’d become a makeshift alert dog for her, to run backup with Claire on a ghoul hunt in Missouri. She wasn’t due back until at least tomorrow. And though she normally played her music loud like this, Jason Manns was hardly her style. Not enough bass.</p><p>That meant— <em>Oh, fuck</em>. He felt his shoulders tighten as dread climbed up his spine. He was suddenly very aware of the note – <em>the</em> note, the one he’d found inexplicably tucked into his pocket after he’d burned Dean’s lifeless body – the note he now kept on his desk.</p><p>Whatever was going on, it wasn’t good. <em>Something</em> was messing with him. Maybe the Empty had gotten into the bunker somehow, to get revenge for the purification spell he’d done before he razed that old barn to the ground. Maybe it was looking for a new home? That seemed unlikely. Ghost maybe? Another wood nymph?</p><p>Sam figured he’d cover his bases for whatever it was. He grabbed what he could from the kitchen to arm himself – a cast iron pan, a pocketful of salt packets from the drive-in theater, and a flask of what he hoped was holy water and not whiskey – and stepped tentatively into the hallway.</p><p>The music seemed to be coming from the library. He crept forward, cast iron pan raised to his chest, moving as quietly as years of practice had trained him for.</p><p>The song ended. Sam froze.</p><p>And then, of <em>course</em>, the same song started up again.</p><p>By the time Sam stepped into the library, he’d heard Jason Manns croon out that song about four times too many. Sure enough, his iPod was no longer in the Impala; rather, it was plugged into a speaker set on one of the library’s tables.</p><p>Sam sighed with relief as he turned the system off, cutting Jason’s voice short. He stared down at the iPod, confused – had he maybe set this up to play while doing research and forgotten? That purification spell to lock the Empty in its own realm <em>had </em>meant a lot of sleepless nights in the library.</p><p>But what about that specific song on repeat, was that just a glitch? <em>The iPod </em>was<em> pretty old.</em> He’d swiped it off a seat of that haunted school bus back in Indiana all those years ago. It was the one good thing to come out of ever stepping foot there.</p><p>As he wracked his brain for an answer, for a memory that didn’t exist, a voice from right behind him cut through his thoughts.</p><p>“I <em>told</em> you if you put an iPod in Baby, I’d haunt your ass.”</p><p>Sam whirled around, throwing his cast iron pan up like a sword and pointed it just inches from Dean’s face. <em>Dean’s</em> face.</p><p>“What are you?” Sam snapped.</p><p>“What are <em>you</em>, Rapunzel?” Dean snickered, nodding at the frying pan in his face. “I mean, you’ve got the hair.”</p><p>Sam chucked a handful of salt packets at him, which bounced off of Dean’s chest and pattered unceremoniously to the floor.</p><p>“Dude, you didn’t even open them.”</p><p>“Answer me,” Sam tried to sound menacing, but the way he shifted his weight gave away his nerves.</p><p>“It’s me. Dean.”</p><p>“I burned your body,” Sam said, jabbing Dean in the chest with the pan. Sam scowled when nothing happened.</p><p>“<em>Ow</em>,” Dean said, though it didn’t hurt. “Not a ghost.”</p><p>“<em>Christo</em>!”</p><p>Dean didn’t even flinch. “Not a demon.”</p><p>Sam pulled the flask out of his back pocket and Dean threw up his hands defensively.</p><p>“Please don’t splash me with the—“</p><p>Sam splashed the holy water straight into Dean’s face.</p><p>“<em>Really</em>, man?” Dean spitting and wiping the water out of his eyes. “How many times do we gotta go through this?”</p><p>“Just tell me who you are.”</p><p>Dean rolled his eyes, throwing his whole body into the movement. “It’s <em>me</em>, man. Same old Dean.”</p><p>“That’s not entirely accurate,” said a low, gravelly voice from behind Sam.</p><p>Sam spun on his heel to see Castiel sitting calmly in a chair by one of the tables.</p><p>“Cas?” Sam said, eyes wide. He whipped back around to Dean, then glanced back at Cas, and when he turned toward Dean again he did so with narrowed eyes. “<em>Dean</em>?”</p><p>Dean grinned. “In the flesh.”</p><p>Seeing them both here was enough to convince him. Sam lurched forward and wrapped Dean up in a forceful hug that damn near squeezed Dean’s soul right back out of him. “Oh my god,” Sam almost tripped over the words. “When? How? <em>Who—</em>“</p><p>“Now, later, me?” Dean coughed out between gasps as Sam crushed his ribs. He patted Sam’s back to tap out, but Sam didn’t quite get the hint.</p><p>“And Cas?!” Sam said, finally releasing Dean from his death grip. He moved to scoop Cas up into a hug of his own, albeit a much more casual one.</p><p>Dean gulped in air that smelled like the aging pages of books, like various herbs for spellwork, like the hint of dust on the large oak tables. Air that smelled a little musty, though comforting. Air that smelled like home.</p><p>“Wait,” Sam said as he stepped back from hugging Cas. “What did you mean by ‘that’s not entirely accurate.’ Dean, what does he mean?”</p><p>Cas just looked expectantly at Dean.</p><p>“Uh,” Dean tensed. “Bobby’s Death now?” That gas station sink was on full blast, huh.</p><p>“<em>Dean</em>,” Cas scolded, not for the first time tonight, and likely not for the last.</p><p>Dean could practically hear the questions racing through Sam’s brain as a myriad of emotions flicked across his face. “Alright, alright,” Dean said. “That’s unrelated. Well, sort of.”</p><p>“What are you—“ Sam started.</p><p>“Don’t freak out,” Dean said, holding up his palms. And with a small roll of his shoulders, a <em>crack</em> split through the air. Every light bulb in the library flickered and buzzed as Dean’s wings snapped into their dimension, knocking books off the shelves and scattering Sam’s piles of notes across the tables.</p><p>Sam stumbled backward, his back slamming into one of the bookshelves and adding more volumes to the mess of discarded tomes on the library’s floor. “<em>What</em> the fuck?” He shouted, eyes wide and gripping the bookshelf to steady himself. “What the fuck, Dean, what the—“</p><p>“You’re not supposed to freak out,” Cas added, ever unhelpful.</p><p>“I didn’t agree to that!” Sam’s breath heaved. He pointed at Dean with a shaky hand. “You’ve got <em>wings</em>!” The words came out almost as an accusation.</p><p>“I’m Hawkman,” Dean grinned.</p><p>“H-how?”</p><p>“He’s an angel,” Cas said, his voice softening. He was no longer bothering to look at Sam. His eyes were glued on Dean’s wings, mesmerized by the shimmer of iridescent teal, and tracking over to the brilliant translucent white of his primaries. Dean tried hard to stamp down the flush he could feel rising up his neck as Cas stared at him like that, seemingly entranced by Dean’s feathers.</p><p>Dean cleared his throat as he folded his wings in carefully. He shot Cas a hard look to say ‘<em>later,</em>’ but Cas just tilted his head with a quizzical expression.</p><p>“<em>You’re</em> an angel,” Sam repeated, slowly, trying to process it. “Not being possessed by one?”</p><p>“Possession is hardly the right terminology,” Cas retorted.</p><p>“Right, sorry,” Sam said. “You get what I mean.”</p><p>“It’s all me,” Dean said. “Courtesy of Jack, I guess. Kid went all Tolstoy on the rules. God’s not the one creating angels anymore. It’s sorta left up to us. All of us. People, I mean.”</p><p>“Huh,” Sam said, finally letting go of the bookshelf. He surveyed the state of disarray the library was in, with dozens of books strewn across the floor, as if he were seeing the mess for the first time. “You couldn’t have proven you were an angel in a less … dramatic way?”</p><p>“Shut up,” Dean grumbled, rolling his shoulders again to tuck his wings fully out of sight. He swore he could see a flicker of disappointment flash across Cas’s face. “And pick up some of these books. You really let this place go while I was gone.”</p><p>Sam scrunched up his face in annoyance. “Jerk.”</p><p>Dean only grinned. “Bitch.”</p><p>Sam’s scowl quickly fell into a smile as he breathed a small laugh. “It’s good to have you back, man. Both of you.”</p><p>“Likewise,” Cas agreed.</p><p>“But it’s getting late, and Dean no offense but you look like shit,” Sam said. “You should get some sleep— wait, do you sleep?”</p><p>Dean nodded. He was pretty sure he was still human-adjacent. At least, he felt like he was. Sleep sounded <em>really</em> good right about now. “Yeah.”</p><p>“Okay, good, because I have a weird amount of questions for you tomorrow. Your room is still the way it was, but—” Sam turned to Cas with a wince. “I sort of gave your room to Claire, she crashes here sometimes in between hunts and I—“</p><p>“That’s alright,” Cas shrugged, far too casual for the next thing he was about to say. The bomb he was about to drop and simply stroll away from without looking over his shoulder. “I was planning on sleeping in Dean’s bed.”</p><p>If Sam looked like he was struggling to process the absolute onslaught of information before, now he looked like he’d completely stopped functioning.</p><p>Dean froze. Yeah, this freakin’ gas station faucet was <em>definitely</em> on full blast. The sink was flooding.</p><p>“You— Dean— wh-what,” Sam stammered, the gears of his thoughts audibly grinding as they tried to remember the rules of syntax. “Y-you two… Good for— I mean, it’s about ti—“</p><p>He looked relieved when Dean mercifully interrupted. “Yup,” he said simply, gathering what little courage he had to step forward and sling an arm around Cas’s waist.</p><p>“Okay,” Sam managed to say. “Okay, cool.”</p><p>“Cool.”</p><p>“Don’t uh,” Sam winced. “Our rooms are close. Just… don’t let me hear you playing ‘hide the angel blade.’”</p><p>Dean wished he had a book to throw at Sam’s head. He opened his mouth to reply, but Cas beat him to it.</p><p>“His angel blade is already hidden,” Cas said, squinting, as the joke soared over his head. It was no wonder his hair was so ruffled.</p><p>Dean busted out laughing. Sam’s face turned an impossible shade of red, and with that, he spun and nearly ran out of the library, shouting a stern, “I mean it!” down the hallway as he left.</p><p>Dean was still laughing as he pulled Cas close. “Wait a second,” Dean said, spotting the wry smile Cas was struggling to hide. “You <em>knew</em>.”</p><p>“That that was a euphemism for intercourse? Yes.”</p><p>“You’re incredible,” Dean laughed, pressing his forehead to Cas’s. “But please, don’t ever call it that again.”</p><p>The next morning came all too quickly. Most nights for Dean were a few fitful minutes of sleep at a time, spaced out by even longer periods of uneasy wakefulness. Some nights, he’d give up on lying there in the dark, getting up to take apart and clean his gun just to give him something mechanical to do to distract him from his nightmares.</p><p>But this morning, Dean’s muscles ached from a lack of movement. He blinked awake, and though there was no natural light in the bunker this far underground, it felt late. He reached over to grab his phone off the nightstand to check the time, when he heard Cas grumble from behind him.</p><p>A strong arm wrapped firmly around Dean’s torso, pulling him just out of reach of his phone. “Hey,” Dean scolded softly.</p><p>“Stay,” came the half-asleep grumble in return.</p><p>“I’m not goin’ anywhere, sweets,” the pet name surprising Dean with how easily it slipped off his tongue. “Just checking the time.”</p><p>“Mmh. Too early,” Cas protested, but loosened his grip just enough for Dean to tilt his phone screen up.</p><p>He blinked in the sudden light and—</p><p>“Dammit, Cas, it’s <em>noon</em>.”</p><p>“Too. Early,” Cas insisted, despite the evidence.</p><p>“No, get up,” Dean said, swatting Cas’s shoulder. “I am not sleeping through breakfast, I haven’t had eggs ‘n’ bacon in— well. I don’t know how long.” A few days, tops. Right?</p><p>He glanced at his phone again, and nearly dropped it.</p><p>“<em>Cas</em>,” he hissed. “Get the fuck up, it’s fucking <em>March</em>.”</p><p>Cas finally opened his eyes, if only to glare at Dean.</p><p>“March. 2021,” Dean emphasized each word with his hands. “I’ve been gone for <em>four months</em>.”</p><p>“Okay.” Cas just blinked with annoyance before tightening his grip around Dean and trying to settle back into sleep. It was tempting to follow him back down. <em>Man, was it tempting.</em></p><p>“I thought you didn’t need sleep, anyway,” he said instead.</p><p>“My grace is waning,” he said matter-of-factly, eyes still closed. “I’m still an angel, but I seem to have human needs. Not unlike you.”</p><p>“Well humans need to eat, too.”</p><p>“I’d rather hibernate.”</p><p>“You know damn well humans don’t do that,” Dean said, prying out of Cas’s grip and sliding off the bed. He picked up one of his Led Zeppelin t-shirts off the back of his chair and chucked it at where Cas was still curled up under the comforter. “Besides. It’s spring now. Time to wake up.”</p><p>Cas mumbled something unintelligible, but it sounded like a swear.</p><p>“C’mon, buddy. I’ll make you coffee.”</p><p>A pause. Then, a reluctant sigh. “Fine.”</p><p>By the time they padded into the kitchen, with Cas still yawning and leaning on Dean to stay upright, it was well past one in the afternoon.</p><p>Dean compromised with the arbitrary rules of time by making an egg and bacon sandwich since it was now after noon (though vehemently refused to call it “brunch”). He made Cas coffee, stirring in a little milk and a dash of honey.</p><p>It became a daily ritual. Sleeping in late, coaxing Cas out with the promise of caffeine. He helped Sam, and soon Eileen, organize hunts and run dispatch for a growing network of hunters – first in the Midwest, then branching out further toward the coasts.</p><p>The routine continued as the months went by. Dean went on a few hunts at first, swooping in to kick the shit out of a few wayward demons and lay a few ghosts to rest. He had wings, but still insisted on driving for days – a decision Sam didn’t get, but Cas didn’t mind, since it meant a lot of time nestled close to Dean on the Impala’s front bench seat (and more often than not, the backseat too).</p><p>It felt good to get back to his roots. Really saving people, hunting things. No more “big bads.” He and Sam may have been forcefully born into the family business, but they’d made it their own. Redefined it outside the confines of revenge and blood. All of these hunts were small time things – Rowena had Hell pretty much buttoned up, and Heaven wasn’t causing problems anymore. It felt small town. It felt anonymous again. With each hunt, Dean’s anxiety eased a little more.</p><p>Dean had first used the hunts as an excuse to track down the Empty, because while he’d insist to Sam’s face that no, of course he trusted that purification spell worked, he was scared shitless the Empty would return. That he’d step into a motel room covered in fungus and rot, that the pavement beneath Baby’s wheels would turn slick with blood, that the grass beneath his feet would crunch into shards of bone.</p><p>He was terrified the Empty’s blistering vines of darkness would rise up from beneath the floorboards and take Cas away, again, this time forever. Cas rested a hand on Dean’s thigh as he drove, grounding him in the present and not the “what ifs” whirling around his head.</p><p>And so they traveled from hunt to hunt, with their journeys slowly fading from ‘trying to track down any trace of the Empty’ into more of ‘any excuse to see family.’ Over time, they spent more time in Baby than in any one place – and this time, it wasn’t the Impala that felt like home. Dean stole lingering looks at Cas on particularly flat stretches of road, and Cas, each time, met his eyes and smiled back. Dean dropped his hand to where Cas’s rested on his leg, and twined their fingers together. <em>This. This was home.</em></p><p>By May, Dean visited the bunker less and less. He’d stopped in for a few days for Sam’s birthday before heading back out to go visit Jody and Donna up north. They’d celebrated Sam’s big day, Dean grabbing Eileen’s wrist and pointing to the ring on her finger as she handed him a slice of cake. He’d laughed as they told the story of Sam nearly botching the proposal and dropping the ring down the sink, while Eileen said “yes” with a wry smile and signing “fuck you” for old time’s sake before they’d kissed.</p><p>By June, Dean and Cas met up with Claire and Kaia for lunch at a tiny red hut somewhere near the coast of Maine in a town Dean didn’t dare try to pronounce. Cas had seemed suspicious about eating shellfish out of what he’d referred to as a glorified fisherman’s shack, but the noise he made during that first bite of buttery lobster roll was damn near pornographic.</p><p>They caught up, perching uncomfortably on the curb to eat their sandwiches and swap stories of their hunts. The girls had just taken care of a nest of vampires up this way, a mobile group that was operating out of summer rental homes and snatching drunken teenagers from Beach Week parties. A lot of the hunts Claire had begged Kaia to agree to were vampire hunts lately. Dean didn’t press, but he was pretty sure he knew why. At one time, he would’ve felt the need to have the revenge talk with her, but he knew Kaia was making sure she kept both feet on the ground.</p><p>Cas handed him a napkin, though Dean wiped his hands on his jeans anyway. “You run across a vamp named Jenny?” he’d asked, off-handedly.</p><p>Claire just shook her head. He wouldn’t admit it, but deep down, Dean was relieved.</p><p>Before they said their goodbyes, Claire handed them each a small bag. “We got you guys something.”</p><p>Cas reached into the bag to pull out a rainbow-colored wristband; in Dean’s bag, there was one striped with pink and purple and blue.</p><p>“It’s June, after all,” she said with a smile. She and Kaia lifted their clasped hands to show off their own wristbands. Dangling around Kaia’s wrist, five colors that ranged from orange to pink. On Claire’s, a wristband that matched Dean’s.</p><p>“Thank you,” Cas said as he and Dean slipped their bracelets on.</p><p>“No problem,” Claire winked. “I got them at Hot Topical.”</p><p>By July, they’d made it to the vast, rolling mountains and valleys of the Adirondacks, where manmade light could barely reach the sky and Cas swore you could see Heaven itself in the stars. Here, in a sprawling open field a few degrees north of a place with just enough people to call itself a town, Dean eased the Impala into the grass.</p><p>“You sure about this?” He asked Cas. “We have that reservation at that bed ‘n’ breakfast in Vermont, and—“</p><p>Cas quieted him with a kiss. “We can check in tomorrow,” he murmured, before pulling away.</p><p>Dean had been wary about going somewhere so sprawling and dark, without any source of light – it reminded him too much of the dark of the Empty. Anything that seemed endless and devoid of life still made fear twine around every one of his nerves. He gripped the steering wheel tight, Baby’s engine rumbling as she idled, waiting for Dean to work up the courage to shut her headlights off and plunge them into the dark.</p><p>Cas just pressed a kiss to Dean’s shoulder and squeezed his hand, as if to say <em>I’m not going anywhere</em> and <em>whenever you’re ready.</em> Dean squeezed Cas’s hand back, took a steadying breath, and killed the engine. But where the Impala’s lights went dead, the field itself came alive with a light of its own, as thousands of fireflies danced through the wild grass in a hopeful search for love.</p><p>They were still in the throes of summer, but the nights were chilly in these parts of upstate New York once the sun dipped below the pines, and so they laid back on Baby’s hood and savored the waning warmth from her engine.</p><p>“Wow,” Dean whispered. He wasn’t just stargazing – he was marveling at the spattering of stars above. No— not marveling. Staring in awe. In <em>reverence</em>. Where he’d been used to seeing a black sky with just a few pinpricks of light, here he couldn’t count the stars if he tried. The sky was marbled with hues of deep purples and pinks and blues and specked with brilliant yellows and whites. The Milky Way stretched across the sky like a scar, but a beautiful one. Like a scar the world chose to bear, and show only to those who cared enough to look.</p><p>Cas hummed in agreement. They laid there together, quietly leaning up against Baby’s windshield and just … <em>being</em>. When Cas began to shiver, Dean did the old cliché yawn-and-stretch, except this time with a wing instead of an arm. He wrapped Cas up in his feathers, and Cas nestled closer.</p><p>“What’s your favorite one?” Dean said softly.</p><p>“Hm,” Cas paused as he mulled it over. “It’s difficult to choose. From what’s visible here, I’d have to say that one.” He pointed up high over the horizon, and Dean had to crane his neck to see it.</p><p>“You’re gonna have to be more specific for me, buddy. If it ain’t Orion’s Belt or one of the spoons, I’m just lookin’ at air.”</p><p>“This one,” Cas said. He laced his fingers in between Dean’s and lifted Dean’s hand in his. He pointed at one star, and traced their hands along the constellation’s length, across the sky, then doubling back and down. “Aquila.”</p><p>“It kinda looks like it’s flying.”</p><p>“It’s supposed to,” Cas said, tracing their hands along the constellation again. “Aquila, the mighty bird trusted to faithfully carry the thunderbolts of Zeus himself.” He paused, a realization seeming to dawn on him. “And also the one who raised a mortal man up to the Gods.”</p><p>Dean huffed a laugh and tightened his wing around Cas. “Fitting,” he whispered. When he looked down from the sky, he found Cas gazing at him instead of the stars. Dean didn’t remember who leaned in first, but it didn’t matter. Their lips met and the rest of the world melted away until the first rays of morning sun began to brighten the sky.</p><p>By August, they’d made their way over to Niagara Falls, taking the scenic route on a trip to go visit Garth, Bess and the kids in Wisconsin. It was about time Castiel met his namesake. Dean couldn’t wait to see how much they’d grown.</p><p>They poked around one of the tourist trap shops in Buffalo so Dean could pick up some gifts for their visit. Some maple syrup and lavender for the adults, a small stuffed black bear for Little Cas, and a stuffed moose for Sam (the kid had some big shoes to grow into). He snatched up a postcard to send to Big Sammy back in Kansas for good measure.</p><p>It was here that Cas insisted they had to go to freakin’ Canada to see the falls, because: “Dean, the pamphlet says that side is better.”</p><p>“It’s a waterfall, Cas, it looks the same all the way around!” He countered, loudly, waving the stuffed toys he was clutching in the air. A woman browsing the novelty salt and pepper shaker aisle had the gall to give him a pitying look and shake her head.</p><p>“But <em>Dean</em>,” Cas pouted.</p><p>“I don’t even have a passport, how do you think we’re getting across the border?”</p><p>Cas just deepened his pout.</p><p>“<em>Oh</em>, no. No way. Nuh-uh. We’re not—“ he glanced around, lowering his voice to a hiss. “—<em>flying</em>. I hate flying.”</p><p>“Not for me, you don’t.” Cas said, and Dean should’ve known that that would come back to haunt him one day.</p><p>He sighed in defeat. “Fine.”</p><p>They rang up at the counter, Cas sneaking in a bag of maple-covered popcorn and getting the cashier to scan it before Dean could say no. Dean just rolled his eyes and pulled a few more bills out of his wallet. When they got back into the Impala, Dean made sure to stuff his mouth full of the popcorn as a tax.</p><p>Dean drove them out of the city, finding a quiet and more secluded spot to stretch his wings. In an instant, they were in Canada, and Dean had to admit that skirting federal border agents felt a little more thrilling than he’d anticipated.</p><p>What he didn’t have to admit, was that Cas was right about this side of the falls. <em>Really</em> right. He didn’t say it, but the way Dean exhaled a breath of amazement spoke volumes to Cas anyway.</p><p>“I told you,” Cas said, smirking, as Dean leaned his elbows on the railing.</p><p>“Shut up,” Dean said, fighting a losing battle to suppress a smile of his own.</p><p>By September, as the heavy humid summer nights slipped into the crisp cool air of fall, they’d finished their first hunt in a long time. It had been weeks since the hunter network Sam and Eileen were running had put out a bulletin nearby. Dean found he wasn’t seeking out hunts anymore, but if one came their way, they grabbed it.</p><p>Over the months, the hunter network had grown into an incredible support system. A hunter going missing was rare, and funerals even more so. They had guidebooks and trainings and protocols and researchers. Eileen had made sure every hunter in the network learned sign language to communicate soundlessly in the field, something that ended up being an invaluable skill when stalking monsters that would much rather be stalking you. They’d even worked out a system for determining how to keep tabs on monsters who’d held on to their humanity, in a branch of the network spearheaded by Garth. Live and let live, he’d called it.</p><p>Hunters didn’t have to sacrifice everything or drift around the country anymore. More and more people began to take on hunts as a side gig, picking up the hunts close by and holding down normal jobs and having families in the meantime.</p><p>Sam really was made for this. Dean smiled as he raised his beer bottle to his lips. He felt damn proud.</p><p>He leaned against Cas as they perched on a steep cliff along the bank of the northern half of the Mississippi River, absently running his fingers through Cas’s hair. They took in the sights, watching fish jump from the water and listening to a group of high teenagers beat a broken rhythm on a hand drum and make up light-hearted songs about passersby.</p><p>Cas melted into him, dozing as Dean stroked his head and watched the sky turn pink and orange with the sunset.</p><p>And there, in a carefree pocket of suburban Minnesota, high above the lifeblood of the Midwest, Dean and Cas found God.</p><p>“Hello!” came a cheery voice right in front of them, and Dean’s head snapped up to see—</p><p>“Jack!” Cas cried as he scrambled to stand up.</p><p>Jack waved, beaming down at them as though he’d seen them just yesterday.</p><p>“You’re back,” Dean said, grinning. He stood and pulled the kid into a hug. “How’s everything, uh, y’know, with the other channels?”</p><p>“All of the realities Chuck wiped out are back,” Jack nodded. “I made sure no one there remembers it ever ended, so. Hopefully it stays the way it was.”</p><p>Cas beamed with pride.</p><p>“It’s good to have you back, kid,” Dean said, clapping a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I’d offer you a drink but, uh,” he gestured to the six-pack he and Cas were nursing. Only beer.</p><p>“That’s alright!” Jack said, and with a snap, a bottle of bright pink strawberry soda appeared in his hand. “I brought my own.”</p><p>Cas and Jack chatted about Heaven, about the changes Jack had implemented, about the systems of all the other universes he’d rebuilt. Cas took a particular interest in a world where the honeybees were lilac instead of gold, and where the grass grew a powder blue. Other universes weren’t so lucky. Jack described his struggle with whether to bring back a reality that had been in the throes of a devastating pandemic, but he ultimately didn’t feel it was right to snuff it out. He watched that world for a while, observing. It was rallying. A story of perseverance. He left knowing that despite it all, they were going to be okay.</p><p>Dean tuned in and out as they chatted about the ethical quandaries and challenges Jack faced. He marveled in how much Jack had grown up, but was also struck with sadness as to how fast he’d been forced to. Dean sat quietly, giving only a few nods of acknowledgement as he nursed a much nicer beer than Bobby had offered him at the celestial Roadhouse. It was a last-second decision to purchase a nicer brew – he deserved it, after all.</p><p>At one point, Jack had tried to apologize for not being powerful enough to rescue Cas himself, but Dean waved him off.</p><p>“It’s not your fault,” Dean said, jolting suddenly out of his malted reverie.</p><p>“I know, but if I was just stronger…” Jack trailed off.</p><p>“It’s because of you that Dean was able to save me at all,” Cas said.</p><p>“Really?” Jack perked up at that.</p><p>“Humans can’t enter the Empty,” Cas explained. “But angels can.”</p><p>“Oh!” Jack grinned. “Wait, but that means—“ his smile faltered as he put together what that meant. That Dean had had to die to become an angel. That Dean had ventured into the horrors of the Empty, a place Jack had once been, albeit briefly. It was an experience Dean still hadn’t really talked about with anyone, not even Cas. He would, eventually, when he was ready.</p><p>The thought of Jack being in the Empty felt like another punch. The kid really never had the chance to be a kid, Dean thought. He’d been born into obligation, rather than a life. Bobby was right – it felt all too familiar.</p><p>“I died, now I’m back,” Dean said, taking what he hoped seemed like a casual sip from his beer. “It’s all good.”</p><p>Jack’s shoulders dropped with relief. He turned to Cas, brimming with excitement. “The system works!”</p><p>“Well—“ Dean said before he could catch himself. “Not quite.”</p><p>“What do you mean?” <em>And damn did that kid sound defeated.</em></p><p>Cas, thankfully, didn’t intervene. He tilted his head curiously and leveled a look at Dean that Dean took as a “go ahead, but be gentle” kind of warning. Back in the bunker, the day after returning from the Empty, Dean had told Sam and Cas about his conversation with Bobby in Heaven. About how it all worked now.</p><p>But he’d left out the part about eternity turning painful. He didn’t want to sour it for Sam, and he didn’t think Cas would understand – Cas, who’d existed for millennia. Eternity to him was probably natural.</p><p>“It has to end,” Dean started carefully. “You gotta give people an out.”</p><p>“I don’t understand what you mean,” Jack said softly, like he was being scolded.</p><p><em>Ah, shit</em>. “I—“ <em>what had Bobby said?</em> “You remember that book I read you, about the half-mortal hero kid?”</p><p>Cas blinked in surprise. “You read him a book?”</p><p>Dean shrugged, the heat of embarrassment crawling up his back. “Kid had trouble sleeping.” He scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “It worked with Sam when he was little.”</p><p>Cas just nodded, and not for the first time, Dean couldn’t find a word for the soft look on Cas’s face.</p><p>“Oh, yeah!” Jack said. “What about it?”</p><p>“‘Life’s only precious because it ends,’” Dean quoted. “Humans just… aren’t built for eternity. An endless amount of time can be…” <em>torturous,</em> he didn’t dare say. “Rough,” he decided on instead.</p><p>“Oh,” Jack looked crestfallen.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Dean said, and he meant it. He meant it with every fiber of his being. He wished it could’ve been different.</p><p>Jack laid back between them on the stony ledge overlooking the river, and sighed as he stared up at the darkening sky. “This is harder than I thought.” He rested the bottle of his strawberry soda on his chest and spun it as he fidgeted in thought. “I thought by fixing all those worlds … I’d know what I was doing.” He turned his head to look up at Dean. “Like you.”</p><p>Dean barked a laugh at that, a single, humorless jolt of surprise. “Let me tell you a secret,” Dean said, laying back next to Jack. “If anyone tells you they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re lying.”</p><p>“But you always—“</p><p>“Fake it ‘til you make it,” Dean chuckled as he nudged Jack’s shoulder. “<em>Then</em> you’ll be like me.”</p><p>Jack smiled. “Fake it ‘til I make it,” he repeated, as though he were filing the advice away for safekeeping in his mind.</p><p>“I hate this,” Dean said suddenly, sitting up to pull another beer out of the carton. “Why’s there have to even <em>be</em> a God anyway?”</p><p>Jack just furrowed his brow and tilted his head in confusion. And <em>man</em>, Dean thought, for a kid who wanted to be like Dean, he had an awful lot of Castiel in him too.</p><p>“You’ve been gone for quite some time now,” Cas offered. “Everything you’ve done, all the changes you’ve implemented, this seems very self-sustainable.”</p><p>Dean tried not to let surprise show on his face, but he was pretty sure he failed. He’d shied away from talking about this stuff from Cas, assumed he wouldn’t get it. But he was wrong. There was a time where Cas would’ve only looked at the bigger picture – but he’d changed. He’d changed because of Dean, because of Jack.</p><p>“Yeah,” Dean rushed. “Hang up the harp and just be a kid.”</p><p>“I don’t… have a harp,” Jack said slowly.</p><p>“Neither do I, what’s with that?” Dean said, throwing a wink in Cas’s direction.</p><p>Cas ignored him. “You don’t have to, of course,” he said to Jack. “But you deserve a childhood. This doesn’t have to be your eternity.”</p><p>Jack sat up, clutching his highlighter-pink soda and nodding solemnly. He took a deep breath as he processed it. Processed what it would mean to give up this power for good, to trade it for the freedom he’d ensured for everyone but himself.</p><p>“Okay,” he finally said. “But I want to fix Heaven first. I want to ‘give people an out.’”</p><p>Dean felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, one he didn’t even know had been pressing down on him.</p><p>Cas smiled and laid a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I may have an idea for that.”</p><p>By the time October rolled around, they’d put a few thousand miles on Baby’s engine, and a few thousand more between them and their memories of the Empty.</p><p>It still haunted Dean, at times. For the first few weeks they were on the road, Dean had insisted on sleeping in the Impala, the two of them crunching together in a backseat much too small for them both. Dean had tried to stay in a motel. Had tried to overcome it. But his hands were shaking so bad that first night they’d booked a room in Nebraska, he could barely get the key in the door.</p><p>It only took about an hour of being in that motel room – one that smelled faintly of mold and mildew – for panic to rise and crash down over him like a wave. Cas had stepped into the room after grabbing their bags out of the Impala to find Dean kneeling in front of the bathroom sink, his hands thrust under the freezing water from the faucet in a desperate attempt to ground himself.</p><p>Cas hadn’t asked then. He’d only wrapped Dean up in his arms and guided him out to Baby’s backseat. For a while, that was the only place Dean felt safe. And now, months later, Cas still hadn’t pried. Deep down, Cas knew why. But even deeper down, Dean desperately wished he’d ask.</p><p>Dean got better, over time. With each passing mile, each highway sign flying by the windows, Dean’s grip loosened on the wheel. His shoulders relaxed more. And finally, he felt safe enough to stay in real beds again, knowing he’d wake up with Cas’s heavy arm slung around him and his breath warm on his neck.</p><p>“I don’t want to be an angel anymore,” he murmured into the dark one night, curled into Cas’s arms in a seedy motel outside a nowhere town of Georgia.</p><p>“Alright,” Cas whispered, laying a reverent kiss to the side of Dean’s throat.</p><p>“I mean it, Cas,” Dean said. “I don’t—“ He rolled over to face Cas, though he could just barely make out his features in the dark. “You’re practically human now.”</p><p>“Yes,” Cas’s answer came matter-of-factly, though Dean knew there was more emotion tied up in it than he was letting on. His grace had dwindled down to nearly nothing after months of the Empty feeding off of it, and Dean grappled with the guilt that maybe his angel-banishing escape trick had done more damage than he’d meant to.</p><p>“I don’t want—I don’t know,” Dean struggled for the words. Didn’t want the guilt of having grace while Cas didn’t; didn’t want his wings to be a constant reminder of what Cas had lost; didn’t want time to leave one of them behind. “Don’t want you gettin’ old without me.”</p><p>“Dean, I’m thousands of years old.”</p><p>“You know what I mean.”</p><p>Cas just gave him a watery smile, soft and sincere. It reminded Dean of the expression he’d had trouble placing back when they were on that riverbank in Minnesota, when Cas had found out he’d read bedtime stories to Jack. It was a four-letter word he was still fighting to formulate in his mind.</p><p>Cas brushed a kiss to Dean’s forehead. “I understand.”</p><p>Where his wings had once felt like hope, like a promise to set things right, to rescue Cas, they now felt like a burden. His wings weighed heavy on his shoulders in more ways than one.</p><p>But he’d wanted to see it through, to see Heaven get fixed, to make sure they were really, truly free of the Empty. Jack was putting the finishing touches on Heaven's final draft at Cas’s behest, and now, people had a way out. A true end they got to choose, where everyone – no matter how abrupt the circumstances of their death – could stay as long as they wanted, see all their loved ones, and make proper goodbyes. And when they were ready, in a true manifestation of free will, they could choose to truly move on.</p><p>And somewhere along the way, Dean’s months of running away from the nightmarish echo of the Empty, had turned into him running toward something better.</p><p>“I, uh. I don’t know how.” Dean shifted nervously.</p><p>“To fall?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“I happen to be well-acquainted with that.”</p><p>Dean couldn’t help the tiny smile that spread across his face in spite of his stress. “You’ll help me?”</p><p>Despite everything they’d been through, everything they’d given up for each other, despite going to the ends of the earth and beyond, breaking the rules of time and reality, something deep down in Dean worried that this would be it. That this would be the final thing, the thing to make Cas take it all back.</p><p>But Cas’s answer came as steady and as sure as it had ever been.</p><p>“Always.”</p><p>One word, one promise, and the last of Dean’s tension began to ebb away. He closed his eyes as Cas ran his fingers through Dean’s hair and leaned into the touch.</p><p>He wasn’t sure how long they laid like that. Dean fought hard to stave off sleep, never wanting this moment to end. Cas must’ve been fighting it too, because his hand grew heavier, his fingers slowing with each stroke.</p><p>Cas leaned forward to rest his forehead against Dean’s. “Will you tell me one thing?”</p><p>“Okay,” he rumbled, his voice thick with sleep.</p><p>“How did this come to be?”</p><p>And there it was. The question Dean had been half-hoping for, and half-dreading at the same time. And it was one he realized he had no idea how to answer.</p><p>“It’s… a long story,” he sighed.</p><p>Cas hummed. “They say every story comes down to just one word,” he said, dropping his hand from Dean’s hair and tracing his fingers lightly up and down Dean’s arm, his fingers grazing the handprint on his shoulder. “Redemption. Forgiveness. Defiance.”</p><p>“What is yours?”</p><p>“Hm?”</p><p>“Your word.”</p><p>“Oh,” Cas said. He paused for a moment to think, his fingers stilling on Dean’s bicep. “Freedom.”</p><p>Dean chewed on his lip. “I guess mine <em>was</em> acceptance.”</p><p>“What is it now?”</p><p>Dean lifted his hand to cup Cas’s face, his eyes searching Cas’s for an answer. He flipped through the page of new emotions he’d been compiling in his head, but there was still so much unwritten.</p><p>“I’m not sure I have a word for this,” he said softly. He ran his hands through Cas’s hair in adoration as he wracked his brain for something that felt worthy enough describe this.</p><p>“Happiness?” Cas offered.</p><p>“That’s part of it. Happiness is too…” He sighed as he trailed off. “Nothing feels … heavy enough.”</p><p>“It doesn’t have to feel heavy, Dean. You can be afforded the luxury of lighter emotions.”</p><p>Dean huffed a laugh. “Can I now?” He teased. “How about the luxury of this?” He leaned in to kiss the tip of Cas’s nose. “And this?” Another kiss for his cheek. “Or—“</p><p>Cas surged forward to catch Dean’s lips before he could plant another teasing kiss that was anywhere but Cas’s mouth. Dean laughed against Cas’s lips before deepening the kiss, running his hands down Cas’s chest.</p><p>“Hey,” he mumbled, breaking away and pulling up Cas’s hand to gently press his lips to Cas’s palm. He rolled his shoulders, and there was a soft crackle as his wings shimmered into view. “How about one last flight?”</p><p>“I have an idea I believe you’ll enjoy more,” Cas said, his voice dropping low. And with a nip to Dean’s throat and a hand tangled in his feathers, Dean moaned and melted into the touch.</p><p>But something else rose up inside of him. A surety as clear as anything he’d ever known, a truth Cas had given him the courage to recognize.</p><p>“I think I know the word now,” he said, and Cas pulled back from where he’d been leaving a bruise on Dean’s collarbone. Dean cradled a hand underneath Cas’s jaw and found himself swept away by Cas’s gaze.</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“Love.”</p>
<hr/><p>It was a sound Dean never thought he’d get a chance to hear.</p><p>Waves crashing on the beach. Seagulls bellowing as they soared overhead. He watched them as they flew, and felt the noticeable lack of weight where his own wings had once been.</p><p>He stretched his legs out, burying his toes in the hot late-summer sand. Sure, it was October, but fall didn’t really exist this far south in Florida outside of a handful of cool days around Thanksgiving time.</p><p>Dean threw a grin over his shoulder as he heard Cas’s bare feet scrunching in the sand behind him, and gasped when he saw what was in Cas’s hands.</p><p>“What is that?”</p><p>Cas grinned right back.</p><p>“Is that—?”</p><p>“I hear the Amish here make excellent pies.” Cas carefully lowered himself onto the blanket next to Dean, balancing several slices in his hands. “I wasn’t certain which one you would prefer, so I purchased several.”</p><p>Dean swiped the Key Lime off the top of the pile. This was Florida, after all.</p><p>His gaze lingered on Cas, as his angel – yes, <em>his angel</em>, now and always, grace notwithstanding – squinted in thought over whether to choose coconut cream or black raspberry. His eyes fell to the vial around Cas’s neck, one that glowed with swirls of golden grace, and absently touched the matching vial of blue that hung around his own neck.</p><p>Cas looked up to catch Dean staring. “Are you alright?”</p><p>“Better than ever,” Dean grinned. “It’s just. I love you.”</p><p>Cas smiled, settling on the slice of black raspberry pie. “I love you, too.”</p><p>Dean leaned over and dropped a kiss to the hand-shaped scar on Cas’s shoulder, distracting him just enough to swipe a forkful of his pie.</p><p>Cas pretended not to notice, a trait Dean both loved, and shamelessly exploited.</p><p>“What now?” Cas asked instead.</p><p>Dean shrugged, a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. He leaned in and brushed his nose against Cas’s temple before laying a gentle kiss just above his ear. “I don’t know,” he said, pulling back to watch the colors dance off of Cas's face as the sun dipped low beneath the water. “I figured we could make it up as we go.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I cannot thank you all enough. For everyone who left a kudos, a comment, or even liked a post of me rambling about this fic on tumblr, THANK YOU. Each and every one of you gave me the fuel to keep going. When I started writing this in November, in the heat of the moment after the finale, I thought this would fizzle out at around 10k words. But here we are, months later, and much longer than I'd ever dreamed. I love all of you for that. And if you liked this, even though it's finished, I'd just about melt if you left one last comment.</p><p>I kept it vague, but if you want to know the exact towns I based their roadtrip off of:<br/>Wiscasset, Maine<br/>Putnam, New York (not the county, the town is very hard to find on a map)<br/>Niagara Falls/Buffalo<br/>Hastings, Minnesota<br/>Richmond Hill, Georgia (seriously the worst motel I’ve ever stayed in, the doors didn’t lock and I slept with a knife under my pillow. But part of this fic was written in the middle of the night there, so I wanted to at least slide in a mention)<br/>Sarasota, Florida (yoder’s has damn good pie)</p><p>And as always, come hang out with me on tumblr! @withclawsandsympathy</p>
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